BEER Magazine
October, 2009
by Corby Anderson
Her name is Cookie, at least that is what she says it is, and I have no reason not to believe her. She is standing up to the ankles of her stylish galoshes in a thick, pasty brown mud puddle, in the rain, drinking beer and smiling wickedly. She says that she has lost her husband somewhere in the large crowd, but that she isn’t worried – he didn’t have enough money on him to get in trouble with.
Her yellowish hair is streaked with mud and lies in plastered dreadlocked clumps across her face. In her left hand she holds the tattered remains of an enormous turkey leg, which she gnaws at in kingly tugs. In her right hand she clutches two small tulip-shaped glass vessels, each half filled with a brew of some sort – which type she does not recall – and each with the words “13th Annual Legendary Booneville Beer Festival – May 2, 2009” laser engraved on them in what was once a nice white font. She takes a swig of one of the glasses and drains its contents and her eyes roll up into her head in what must be a sign of total satisfaction, or concentration (I hope), and then she snaps back and tilts her head sideways to go in for a pink chunk of bird muscle. As she chews, I cant help but reach out with my pointer finger and point out that her stringy black fu-Manchu mustache is caught up in her food, and she thanks me while laughing wildly and trying to dig it out with her pinky, and then she wanders off into the swirling crowd of rain-soaked beer drinkers.
Cookie is just one of many mustachioed ladies, not to mention men, milling through the Mendocino County Fairgrounds. Apparently, there was a pirate theme to this year’s event, which seems to perfectly match the edgy milieu of the Beer Festival in Boonville, California.
Boonville is a fairly remote North Coast town (about a hundred miles north of San Francisco) situated in the Anderson Valley, which has been made famous by the Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s successful brand, and which lies in the transition zone on the upper fringe of wine country and the southeastern edge of dope country. It is a beautiful place, a green, pastoral sixteen-mile long valley filled with creeks and sheep and goats and a fun lot of hardy locals. The entire town rallies around the Boonville Beer Festival in an admirable community effort, which is appropriate since all of the proceeds from the ticket sales ($40 in advance, $50 at the gate) go to various local non-profits.
The Beer Festival originated in 1997, when it served as the grand opening for the then-new Anderson Valley Brewery. That first year consisted of a free blowout featuring all of the Anderson Valley brands. It was such a hit that other breweries were invited in subsequent years, and the size of the crowds, and thus the proceeds for such vital local services as the AV Ambulance Service, the AV Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, and the Lions Club have grown exponentially. Without tabulating this year’s haul into the equation, the festival reports having raised almost $150,000 over the years.
The 13th “running of the beers” seemed to actually have a bit of luck going for it, despite the ominous numerological aspect. Even with torrential (think buckets pouring down through vertical sheets) rains and heavy fog, a boisterous crowd made it to the Fairgrounds intact and ready to sample the seventy-eight different breweries who tapped a total of three hundred different ales, pilsners, IPA’s, stouts, and barley wines. Many festive-ites, including most of the brewers and their families, came for the weekend, setting up camp in the middle of a Friday downpour that did not seem to want to peter out.
Musician Brad Manosevitz came in via a “terrifying ride on a tiny prop plane through a severe winter storm” that started in his home base of Aspen, Colorado. Once on the ground in California, he was still unsure of his luck as he made his way to his gig on the Beer Fest stage. “We were literally driving to the boonies!” said Manosevitz. “The road from the San Francisco airport to Anderson Valley was insanely curvy, foggy, rainy. You couldn’t see a thing, not even a foot in front of the car. It felt like we were going to die, man. And if we had wrecked, there was no cavalry coming to help,” he added in describing the gauntlet-like effort that it took for most people to actually travel to the festival.
Getting inside the gates of the Fairgrounds was a bit of a chore. A long line full of thirsty looking pirates snaked down the block in advance of the 1 pm opening. It was reported that last year some attendees did not get into the festival until it was more than halfway over due to long lines and organizational miscommunication. Learning from their challenges, considerable energy was put into fixing this year’s entry procedure by event organizers, and thus this years gate drop went considerably smoother, though it was not entirely problem-free, due in large part to the heightened urgency brought on by the persnickety rain.
Once entrance was gained for myself and several thousand fellow beer drinkers, the race to taste as many beers as possible in four short hours was officially, fully on.
The brewers near the entrance were mobbed immediately, a situation that a few astute attendees recognized and avoided by going further down to the end of the long wooden A-frame structure that housed many of the vendors. Seppi Morris, from Grants Pass, Oregon, decided the best bet was to stick close to one brewer station and try several varieties of their beers in quick succession. “It’s a four ounce glass. It goes down in one gulp,” he said as he posted up near the Habanero Beer cooler-kegs.
As the crowd thickened and movement became more difficult, my natural inclination to flee to open space took hold in a powerful way, and I found myself skirting around the corner to what looked like open grass. Once out of the crush and around the bend I was glad to see several large white tents set up in a large, open field, each housing twenty or so brewers who worked out of the center of a hollow square. Manosevitz’s distinct “Texas Counter-Country Folk Rock” blasted out of an old PA, and a sizable group of partying pirates danced various forms of jigs in defiance the inclement weather, which had thankfully downgraded itself from hard rain to drizzle status.
Every now and then, for no apparent reason, a roar would go through the crowd in a rolling wave from one side of the fairgrounds to the other. You could hear it coming at you like an earthquake, or a propeller plane. The short burst of group cheer seemed to happen in random intervals, and its origin was of great curiousity to me until the answer presented itself to me directly. As we walk through the crowd, I find myself coming face to face with an enormous straw hat that seems to have human legs and most of a female midriff attached. I try to avoid the collision, but like a guided missile, the hat just keeps coming at me, and when I dodge to the left, it too goes inexplicably that way, and runs right into my chest at a full marching pace. Having a long history of running into things, I was prepared for the contact, and thus soaked up most of the energy with a big net-hug, but even my powers of absorption cannot save the hat woman’s commemorative glass from launching out of her hand and splattering in shards on the concrete. When it happens, everything stops for about .5 seconds, and then the beer fans around us roar out a huge cheer and I hear the sound echoing off around the fairground. I realize then why the cheers occur. Some things you can only really understand by wrecking into them.
Just about anything, it seems, can be used to make a pirate outfit. Scarves, strange vests, bad hats, fishnet stockings, dreadlock’s that may or may not have been wigs. The female mustache and/or beard combo was quite popular, and took some getting used to. I noticed quite a few Oakland Rai
der fans in the crowd, identifiable by their black and silver pirate skull and cross-bones logo. At first I thought that it was just normal beer swilling garb for Raider fans, which would make sense geographically. Oakland is not that far from Boonville.
Lunchtime – always important to the mid-day beer drinking experience. Bewitched by an outstandingly sharp and effortless Great White beer from nearby Lost Coast Brewing Company, I mosey over to the vendor section, hankering for a soft taco made of vertically spit-turned Carnitas al Pastor, which is capped on the spit with a freshly corked pineapple, cooking into the spinning tube of pork meat with a sweet tang.
Out on the edge of the field, near the bratwurst vendor, a crowd had gathered in a circle, which looked all the world to be a fight in progress. Closing ground through the muddy grass, I see that it is actually an impromptu female mud-wrestling match. There, in the middle of the circle, several well-endowed ladies were grappling in the rain and goopy mud, which they gleefully smashed each other into. They were very dirty girls, completely covered in the grey-brown sludge, and seemed quite thrilled by the attention until they were upstaged by what turned into a full-on mosh pit of fellows who took no quarter of one another, punching and thrashing each other with brotherly aggression.
The crowd hooted and hollered, and finally settled into a Brazilian “ole, ole” soccer chant. An aging guy who may have been fully blitzed seemed to fancy himself the referee, and stood in the middle of the pit for quite sometime untouched by the carnage about him, until he too was tackled by the belligerents. After several failed attempts to get up from the slick muck, he finally succeeded in standing back up. One of the ladies pointed out that the ref’s cell phone, which was clipped to his belt, was caked with dirt, and instead of cleaning it, he grabbed the phone, held it aloft towards the low clouds Statue of Liberty style, and then appeared to screw the top off of the thing. It was a ruse in cellular form, which he revealed to all by pouring whatever liquid was contained in the faux phone-flask into his mouth from a good foot above his head. Most of the contents missed the target, but he did not seem to care, and why should he have? Once you are that muddy, a little spilled liquor only serves to season the pot.
We progressed around the fairgrounds to another semi-autonomous drinking section, which was called the Lamb Palace. The name probably comes from the fact that it actually is a lamb palace, or at least a place for lambs to be when the fair was on. The Lamb Palace is a corralled in area with steel gates and wooden sections that now held some of the more popular breweries featured at the Booneville Beer Festival, by the looks of things. Beer festivarians were literally squished into the corral, some stuck so far away from the taps that they could only stand there helplessly with their useless arms pinned to their chests. It looked like a stampede about to break loose. It was a dangerous scene, and a sobering trial for any claustrophobe.
Working my way through the enthused morass of multiply soaked drinkers, I was pleased to discover that one of my favorite beer makers, the Marin Brewing Company, were there with their newest brand, “Witty Monk” – a Belgian inspired wheat beer. In barnacle fashion, I was able to attach my shoulder to the wooden post that framed the MBC
section of the Lamb Palace, and spend a good moment discussing the beer with Head Brewmaster Arne Johnson, who has been at the Boonville Beer Fest every year (he thinks). Witty Monk is a light, fresh tasting bit of effervescent goodness that is so new that it doesn’t even have a label yet and is only available at the brewery in Larkspur. I wanted to discuss more, and perhaps catch some of the excellent swag (including thongs – not for me) that MBC was supplying, but the moment was fleeting due to the clamoring tide of humanity that swept me out the green-gated corral exit of the Lamb Palace.
Out around the corner from the Lamb Palace squish fest was a large barn-like building that was open on two sides through doors that spilled internal light and seemed to call me into it like a mother holding out a large blue terrycloth towel for a soaked child. It was then that I realized that I had been standing in the rain for a good ten hours, including time earlier in the morning getting geared up around the brewer’s camp. Every atomic particle of my being was logged with hydrogenated oxygen. Standing in the dry barn felt foreign, as if I was missing something dear – perhaps a water-based version of the phantom sensation known to amputees in which they can still feel their missing limbs. Only here, I could still feel the rain on my face.
Scanning around in the barn I came to see that it was almost totally empty, save for a few yellow bleachers, and at least three times as big as the Lamb Palace. Why the barn was not used for the purposes of Beer Fest instead of, or in addition to, the Lamb Palace, I do not know.
It is hard to keep track of time in a situation such as this. As the clock ticked on and the taps started to dry up, the insatiably thirsty crowd would swarm the nearest open tap. Following this flocking, I soon found myself drinking a fantastic can of ale from Dales Pale Ale, from the Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado. “We’re the first micro to start canning our own beer seven years ago. We did it for the fresh factor. These cans don’t have the headspace that bottles have that allows oxidation to occur. Air is bad for beer, and also with the aluminum cans minimal light can get to the beer, creating the freshest package for beer,” says Oskar Blues Rep Meg Gill. Dales is a remarkably vibrant ale, with strong punch of hops and a good strong kick on the way down. That it comes in a sturdy aluminum can makes it unique, but the beer is a winner even if it were bottled like everything else. It has that rare oomph that people want in a beer, a distinctive tang. And it made for a great last beer of the festival proper, a fact that was driven home by the roving band of officials who were spread out and sweeping the grounds like ski patrollers, hollering while gathering up everyone and ushering the diehards to the gates.
After a day full of outstanding beers, great food, and bouncy music shared with a crowd of hearty hopheads in all-out element battle, the amazing thing is that it is possible that all of that was not even the best part of Booneville Beer Fest.
That distinction goes to the camping that took place in the fairground camp area, and for the brewers and their people, out at the nearby Anderson Valley Brewery grounds. There, I met up with John Kuhry, the General Manager of the host Anderson Valley Brewing Company, and his wily crew of party people and proceeded to dig on yet more beer in yet more rain. Due to the quick hitting nature of the crowded Beer Fest tap dance, I may have actually learned more about beer and the philosophy of beer making in one hour of strolling the campground, going from one brewery camp to the next than I did in four and a half hours at the Beer Fest.
Even the campground had quality entertainment. The Humboldt Firken Tappers are a full-sized big band who frequent beer events, especially the Booneville Beer Fest. Their motto is “the more that you drink, the better we sound,” and they sound fantastic playing their assortment of random covers from their tarped-in nook at the upper-camp. The Firken Tappers can be heard from about a mile away, and serve as the background music for almost the entire camp scene, except for the area next to our camp, and technically the area directly next to my leaky tent.
There, a beat-deficient man played a full set of drums at John Bonham energy levels, by himself, sans guitars or vocals, almost all night long. This doesn’t bother us all that much because we are away from our own camp for most of that time, but as the hours add up to a new calendar day (and then some), and lying down, or even possibly trying to dry off begins to sound oh so good, I am forced to ask him to please-for-the-love-of-God-just-stop-that-miserable-racket, once or three times. And eventually he does, with a delirious flourish, my guess is at about 3:30 am.
I
n the morning there is finally sunshine, and much rejoicing about that. We are left in a muddy mess, many with awful hangovers and lost belongings. But to a man, and woman, there are authentic smiles and abundant laughter as tents get shoved into car trunks and chairs dumped of rain puddles and kegs packed up into pickup beds.
On the way out, I stop by the Anderson Valley Brewing Company taproom and scoop up a few excellent tie-dye AVBC souvenir t-shirts. There, a long line has formed from the taps all the way to the back of the merch room. As it turns out, the line has formed by beer aficionados who are eager to get a special release of seven-year aged Port Barrel Stout – a 750 ml wine bottle that is being released only to those in the know, who attended the Beer Fest. Seven is my lucky number, I tell the couple in front of me. I was married on 7/7/07. So when I pay the man and go out around the back of the brewery to get my bottle, which is being handed off to people directly out of the cooler, scan the label of the beer handed to me and find that it is bottle # 77, I am only mildly surprised. It was just that kind of weekend at the Boonville Beer Festival.
Read Full Post »
Down Canyon - Words, Thoughts, Ideas, and Stories by Corby Anderson 