JUNE 1998

VOL.3 NO.6

GABF in Baltimore -- What If We Gave a Beer Fest and Nobody Came?

Take one of the world's largest and most successful beer festivals on the road. Plan it for the springtime, so as to not conflict with the original fall main event, and plunk it down on the other side of the country. And schedule it for a weekend when a lot of tourists will already be in town for other events.

Sounds like a good idea, but will it work?

This was the scenario facing the management of the Great American Beer Festival when they decided to go "on the road" to Baltimore and host a scaled-down version of the 16-year-old, Denver-based beer fest. They scheduled three tasting sessions over the course of the Friday and Saturday, and just to make sure that people knew there would be western brewers in attendance as well as the more familiar names from the east, they invited as many as possible of the previous year's medal-winning breweries. Then, to top it all off, they chose one of the Charm City's busiest tourist times: Preakness weekend.

As early as a month in advance of the Festival, there were no hotel rooms to be had in the city -- procrastinating brewers and beer aficionados found themselves stationed in suburban motels or facing long daily drives. One day before the event, the streets of Baltimore were humming with sightseers, the airport arrival concourse was heating up with crowds of visitors and the bars and restaurants of the touristy Inner Harbour district were already seeing big sales.

Unfortunately, the pre-festival build-up did not seem to translate into bodies tasting beer at the Baltimore Convention Center. Expected to draw 20,000 or more tasters throughout the weekend, the final attendance total reported by GABF management was a mere 8,000 -- 2,500 on each of the Friday and Saturday night sessions and 3,000 on Saturday afternoon. With such slight crowds and zero line-ups at the serving stations, however, those who did attend certainly got their money's worth.

As my wife, Christine, and I strolled the aisles on Saturday afternoon, I couldn't help but be struck by how people were actually able to speak with the real brewers of the beers they were tasting, and to sample those brews without their neighbour's elbow sticking into their ribs. Contrasted to the madness that typifies a Denver GABF session, this was beer tasting luxury!

There were 400 beers from 125 breweries at the Baltimore event, so I obviously didn't have the opportunity to taste them all. Nonetheless, there were a few that stood out above all the others sampled. The Yards Brewing Company's Belgian Saison was one of those, with a stylishly tart front and a nice sharpness on the nose, and the Sweetwater Tavern's Yippee Ei-o-Springbock Lager was likewise enjoyable, with a beautiful balance and a pleasing, non-cloying sweetness. Fabulous flavour was also supplied -- yet again! -- by Wisconsin's New Glarus Brewing, this time with a superb Framboise characterized by a huge fruit nose and pleasant tang in the body.

Of the local brews that caught my attention, I thought that both the DeGroen's Pils and DeGroen's Rauchbock from Baltimore Brewing were excellent brews, the former floral, dry and quenching and the latter fresh, rich with smokiness and backed by complex, flavourful malt. Also quite impressive were the dry, strong, Belgian-inspired golden ale, Ozzy, from the Brewer's Art and the East Kent Golding hop-spiced IPA from Red Brick Station, with a good bitterness and enough malt and alcohol to balance.

For those who missed the Baltimore event because they live in the western States, this fall's Denver GABF promises to be bigger -- and likely more crowded! -- than ever. For the rest of us, the GABF executive will reportedly decide within a month or two whether they will repeat in Baltimore next year, move their On the Road show elsewhere or drop it entirely. Keep an eye on World of Beer for more information as the situation develops.

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