The Year in Beer, NH Edition

I consider myself lucky that New Hampshire is fertile ground for local breweries and, of course, the festivals that celebrate the area's finest beers.

We have brew pubs like...

• Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH
• Elm City Restaurant & Brewery in Keene, NH (the town where Chardonnay went to college)
• Flying Goose Brewpub in beautiful New London, NH
• Millys Tavern in Manchester, NH
• Moat Mountain Smoke House and Brewing Co, in North Conway, NH
• Seven Barrel Brewery in Lebanon, NH (a popular stop for us on our way to/from Canada)
• Portsmouth Brewery in (of course!) Portsmouth, NH

In addition, we have actual breweries as well, from the tiny...

• White Birch Brewing in Hookset, NH
• Throwback Brewery in Hampton, NH (near the seacoast)
• Tuckerman Brewing Company in North Conway, NH

To the pretty good sized...

• Red Hook Portsmouth Brewery in Portsmouth, NH, which has a national presence so you can try some of their concoctions even if you aren't in New England!

To the rather big...

• Anheuser-Busch Inc. in Merrimack, NH--winter home of the Clydesdales!

(Note: This list isn't meant to be exhaustive, but includes most of the places I've visited or beers I've had the pleasure of trying.)

There were a quite a few nice beer festivals this year, although I didn't get to go to every one--it's not really feasible, unless your life is devoted to sampling beer all the time!

This year, I had the pleasure of attending the following brew fests:

• American Craft Beer Fest (ACBF), in Boston last June. This was the biggest of them all, with thousands of people attending at Boston's Seaport World Trade Center.
• Southern NH Brewers Festival, held at the White Birch Brewing company in Hookset last July. This event was outside during one of the heat waves we had in NH this year, and--unusual for a beer festival!--they provided giant electric fans placed all around the tents, large buckets of bottled water on ice (very popular!), and free food as well. I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of the free stuff--it was very much appreciated by this attendee.
• NH Brew Fest, held at Red Hook Brewing in Portsmouth, and presented as part of the Prescott Park Arts Festival last weekend.

My tastes in beer currently lean toward the "hoppier" beers--the more hops, usually, the better, depending on the hops. That means that I tend to gravitate toward the India Pale Ales (IPAs), and American Pale Ales, although I'm willing to try others, especially at the festivals.

Sandra, who doesn't really drink beer all that often, usually finds a few brews that meet her particular tastes. These usually include the "fruity" beers--ciders, blackberry or blueberry wheat beers, and some pumpkin beers as well. At the NH Brew Fest, she found a barley wine that she liked as well.

The festivals weren't just attended by local breweries; there were many breweries from all over the country, from states like Colorado, California, and even Hawaii!

The NH Brew Fest last weekend was probably the last fest I'll be attending this year, but I'm quite looking forward to them all again next year.

Bon Appetit!

New Hampshire Beer Fest

Yeah, I know. Two Beer Fest blog entries in a row, but I guess it's Oktoberfest season, and a good reason to invite people to drink beers.

Last year's Beer Fest was great, although the weather was rainy. So rainy, in fact, that everybody huddled within the long beer tent to keep from getting soaked, making the place seem a hell of a lot more claustrophobic than it should have been.

This year's Beer Fest was better. The weather was cool but nice--typical NH autumnal weather when it's not raining. There were probably even more people than last year, but with people willing to be outside of the tents, it felt a lot more roomy!

I'm not sure if this was true last year, but this year, all the beer vendors were arranged in alphabetical order, with Alligash the first one as you entered, and Widmer Brothers bringing up the other end. All the microbrews in the region (with some exceptions) were represented (C'mon, Harpoon! You can have your Oktoberfest thingy some other week!). There were even some from out of state--California, Boulder Colorado, and even Kona in Hawaii.

My first visit was to Greg Oulette, the brewer for Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH. I've known Greg since before he was at Martha's (he worked at Incredibrew and some of his recipes are still there). I had my first--and, arguably the best--beer from Greg's table, Dr. Hoppenstien's Double IPA that was spot on for taste and bitterness. My next taste was one that I had only a teasing sample from at the Nashua Beer Fest... Widmer's Drifter Pale Ale. This had a lot of flavors I don't normally associate with pale ales, but it works. I can't wait to find it at my local store.

One beer hit me as kind of special. It was Taint Town Pale Ale from Kennebunkport Brewing. They had it on draft and in cask. I had the cask version, and instead of the bold hoppiness I expect from Pale Ales, it had more floral overtones... like smelling a bale of hay that had been left out in the rain. The taste startled me at first, but by the time I finished it, I knew it wouldn't be my last taste of that cask full of nectar, and I had a refill.

Like last year, the Beer Fest had two sessions, from 1-4pm, and from 6-9pm. The first session, though, also had a special "VIP" session from 12-1pm (for an additional fee). It let you get into the Beer Fest an hour before the teeming hordes. I so enjoyed my first hour at the Fest that it wasn't until about five minutes before one o'clock that I noticed there was a bunch of people waiting outside the beer tent waiting to come in. And by a "bunch," I mean QUITE A LOT OF PEOPLE! When the hour chimed, the little plastic fences were taken down, and the cozy, comfortable "almost one on one with the brewers" feel of the place was replaced by long lines of people wanting to partake of the brewers' tasty wares.

Sandra enjoyed last year's Beer Fest because there were a lot of Oktoberfest beers, and a lot of "fruity ales" (pumpkins mostly, and her favorite, a Blackberry Wheat from Long Trail). This year, on the other hand, even Long Trail neglected their Blackberry Wheat. On the positive side, I knew that she liked lighter-tasting brews, and she enjoyed Kona's Longboard Lager, Kennebunkport's Light beer (forget the name--sorry!), and Widmer's Hefeiwizen. The special brew for her was Martha's Exchange "Prior's Passion," which tasted delightful not only to her, but to me--something very unusual being that our tastes for beer are so different. (Greg, we owe you another visit soon!)

I'm happy that Red Hook, Prescott Park Arts Festival, and WHEB have decided to revive the NH Beer Fest last year, and appear to be set in making this an annual event again. This used to be sponsored by the old (and, unfortunately, apparently no longer a beer-brewing company) Nutfield Brewing Company at their headquarters in Derry, NH (as well as one or two at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth). I miss the old event, but the new one is taking up the slack very nicely.

Next Saturday, Prescott Park Arts Festival is having a Chili Cook Off event at Strawbery Banke. Although the chili will be free with admission, Red Hook will be there selling a few of their beers to help quench the bowls of fire that will be on offer there. If you're in the neighborhood, I hope to see you there!

Bon Appetit!

Nashua Beerfest

Last Saturday, the City of Nashua held its first Beer Fest from 4pm to 8pm. The venue was Holman Stadium, the former home of the Nashua Pride and the short-lived Nashua Defenders. There was a tent erected around the pitcher's mound, and vendors included InBev, Red Hook, Long Trail, Boston Beer Company, and Smuttynose. Each attendee was given ten tickets, each good for a single 3-oz. sample. There was an opportunity for each attendee to purchase an additional strip of six tickets for $5.

InBev was an eye-opener at the Fest. This is the company that purchase Anheuser Busch, and while they had their standard Bud, Bud Light, and Bud Light Lime, they also had Boddington's, Bass, Stella Artois, and Hoegaarden as well.

Red Hook was very well represented, and they augmented their own beers with those of their partners Widmer (which had a wonderful Drifer Pale Ale), and Kona Brewing.

While I'm not a fan of Sam Adams, the Boston Beer Company had their own tables that offered some of their beers (my favorite was Lattitude 48 IPA). They also had a "Beer A" and "Beer B" vote, which contained two nice beers. My favorite in the vote was something they called a Belgian IPA.

Green Mountain Beverage was at the Beer Fest with their hard ciders, which Sandra enjoyed. Sandra tried them all, and her favorite was a "dark and dry" cider, although she had good things to say about all of the ciders (another favorite was a Granny Smith cider).

A brewery I never heard about, Brewdog Brewery was there with interesting signage, although the beer they were featuring, Dogma, advertised enough foreign ingredients to turn be a bit off. The next day, however, I saw a bottle of one of their IPA's that I purchased and found to be quite decent. I believe Brewdog is an Scottish brewery, and it appears to have a very interesting marketing concept of wanting to create the world's strongest beers.

Tuckerman's Brewery had a couple of their beers available, as did Smuttynose and Woodstock Inn and Brewery. Long Trail was also there; I had their Pale Ale, and Sandra loves their Blackberry Wheat.

My biggest disappointment of the evening was the failure of Harpoon Brewery to show up, although the flyers indicated they would be there.

For a Beer Fest, I found Nashua's to be different than most--it had a children's play area, and even a singer that played kids' songs in between sets of the local rock and roll bands that played. This may be an interesting idea that might catch on. After all, there are a bunch of beer drinkers with small children that may not be able to addend such "adult oriented" festivals because there's usually nothing for kids to do, and I cannot think of anything more boring to kids than an event focused solely on adults.

I got my caricature drawn (for free!) at the event. The lady that drew it told me that this was her first time ever drawing a person with a full beard. I liked the picture so much that I'm at least temporarily using a modified version of it as my Twitter avatar, but I've been trying a bunch of them over the last few weeks...

All in all, I found the Nashua Beer Fest to be very entertaining. The rock bands were pretty good, the brews were very nice, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and the venue was large enough to be very roomy without being too large to get lost. If the City of Nashua delivers on their promise to have this as an annual event, I can see this becoming quite popular, as New England is the home to many, many fine breweries.

Bon Appetit!