Spectre’s Sayings

I had a good time at the Brewers’ Heritage Festival is St. Louis on Saturday. The ground was soggy due to recent weather, but it didn’t rain during my session.

I got a nifty little tasting glass which resembles a miniature version of a pilsner glass. There was a logo on one side, and a 3 oz. indicator mark on the other.

It was a well-attended event on Saturday. There was a lager tent, an ale tent, a food tent, a festival tent, a stage, and a merchandise tent. Brewers lined the side of the Ale, Lager, and Festival tents on the side of the tents in the direction of the exterior of the venue. This allowed for short lines parallel to each other - one for each variety of beer. The organizers set up small bar tables throughout the tents, around which people stood and tasted. This encouraged people to move away from the lines, which further aided movement to and from the lines.

The homebrew that I tasted was a very interesting light-colored rye beer. The festival brew was a dark lager - that is, a lager brewed using dark-colored base malts. An interesting idea, I must say. Four different breweries took a stab at making the festival brew. I was very pleasantly surprised by Anheuser-Busch’s version. If they made it commercially available, I would buy it, and consider it their second-best beer (after the Michelob Porter).

Schlafly’s Imperial Stout was the only stout I tried, and it appeared to be a very young beer. There was a noticeable hotness to the alcohol. I’d recommend cellaring that beer for a while.

My brother tried a smoked beer (not a porter, interestingly enough). I took a whiff, and it smelled for all the world like a smoked ham. I couldn’t imagine drinking something that smelled like that, but he said it tasted very good.

I ended up trying a lot of different beers, including two different types of porters, blonde ales & lagers, a dortmunder Helles, a couple of red ales, and my favorite of the day, a Vienna lager. There were other beers that I tried and enjoyed too.

Here’s a few pictures I took by holding my camera up over my head:

And my drinking buddies (who also happen to be related to me) who came with me:

A good time was had by all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Happenings, Beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.