Music City Brewer's Festival 2010: A Quick Look Back

2010 Music City Brewer's Festival, afternoon session

Every time I go to a beer event or festival, I have the best of intentions. I plan to keep notes and have a record of what beers I liked and what beers I didn't. But of course it never happens like that. This held true for the 2010 Music City Brewer's Festival, which took place July 31 in downtown Nashville.

And since dozens of beer samples are involved, I usually start growing forgetful about halfway to three-quarters through the event. The one time I did keep notes, my writing grew progressively less legible during the session and I lost my notes on the way home. (I found them several days later; that's how I'm able to verify the legibility part.)

So with no notes from this year's session, I'm left with general recollections. Here they are...

• This was my second Music City Brewer's Festival. As in 2009, I attended the afternoon session (noon-4 pm). The night session (6-10 pm) is known to get a little wild and I had a blast at the earlier session last year. Plus the brewer's don't run out of beer. There is one drawback, though, and it's a serious one: the heat. This year's mid-90s temps and high humidity were more oppressive than last year, when I was able to down samples of Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot Ale (a barleywine) and Yazoo Brewing Co.'s Sue (a cherry-wood smoked porter) with little hesitation. This year, the darker, heavier beers were not going down as easily, and it's tough to taste a lot of beers when you're slowly sipping your way through samples.
  
  
• That said, my favorite beer of the event was Yazoo's casked Sly Rye Porter aged with Olive and Sinclair cacao shells. Or is it cocoa nibs? Regardless, it was absolutely delicious.
  
  
• The guys of Bounty Bev, a growing Nashville distributor that has been bringing a lot of new beers to the local market, were working the Stoudt's Brewing Company booth. Stoudt's—along with Caldera, Butternuts, French Broad, Fort Collins and O'Fallon's—is one of Bounty Bev's brands. I had heard good things about Stoudt's American pale ale and was able to confirm that information firsthand with a tasty sample.
  

• Good People Brewing Company is another brewery with plans for the Nashville market. Owner/brewer Jason Malone told me at the festival that the Birmingham, Ala.-based beermaker is shooting for an early 2011 debut in Music City. A newcomer to their beers, I tried their American pale ale first and was kind of lukewarm about it. Then I followed that up with their Hitchhiker IPA and loved that. I'm definitely looking forward to Good People's arrival to the area.
  
  
• I sampled one homebrewed beer during the festival. It was made by a member of the Murfreesboro homebrew club, which was sharing a booth with the Music City Brewers homebrew club. It was a Rauchbier (German for "smoked beer") and it was great. Advertised by the brewer as "barbecue in a glass," it was brewed using 75 percent Rauch malt and required some tricky decoction mashing (which means you remove part of the mash, heat it up separately, then return it to the mash tun). The beer was definitely smoky but I didn't feel that it was overwhelming by any means. I'm really glad I gave this one a try.
  
  
• Speaking of barbecue, the restaurant Jim 'N Nick's was selling a delicious barbecue taco during the event. Granted I was starving for some lunch and may have been a bit predisposed to anything remotely edible, but this dish seemed well worth seeking out at the restaurant.
  
  
• I was surprised to see Arrogant Bastard on tap at the Stone Brewing Co. booth, and my surprise earned me a generous pour from the Stone rep. This was about midway through the four-hour session and I feel like this delicious brew may have been the turning point for my day. I still tried plenty of beers after this, but between the blazing heat and my increasing impairment, things started to feel a little less like fun and a little more like work.

That's it. All in all, it was a great time and a valuable learning experience for me. If you were hoping for more detailed beer reviews, sorry. Then again, this isn't a beer-review blog. This is a blog for homebrewers and beer drinkers who want to learn more about beer along with me. Thanks for reading.