The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition)
Page 9
PHILOSOPHY
Flanders on the Klondike. This is innovative, Belgian-style brewing in the heart of wild Alaska—as unexpected as they come. Recently Fletcher has launched the Culmination Festival, a small but ultraprestigious gathering of American and European brewers that use hops, wood, and wild yeast to memorable effect. Collaborations and guest brewer visits have included the likes of Jolly Pumpkin (resulting in Clementina, a clementine, yuzu, and lime peel brew dosed with pink Himalayan salt and coriander), as well as Vermont’s Hill Farmstead, and the global icon of sour beer, Cantillon.
The Great Alaskan Beer & Barley Wine Festival, started in 2005, is held every January, traditionally in downtown Anchorage’s Egan Convention Center. Brewers compete for medals and bragging rights in the Barley Wine category and mingle with about 2,000 fans a night. Do as the locals do and hang out in the Alaska section of the fest, where just about every single commercial brewery in Alaska has a booth with fresh beer. There’s a Connoisseur Session on the final afternoon, for which the brewers present beers they used to hide under the tables. Highly recommended for tried-and-true craft beer lovers. (auroraproductions.net/beer-barley.html)
KEY BEER
Fletcher debuted at the 2011 Great Alaskan Beer & Barley Wine Festival with Anticipation, a superb double IPA (9% ABV), though it was more a test run (not barrel-aged in the cellar), and began releasing his main line of six distinct beers in 2011. These included the intriguing Love Buzz Saison, brewed with rose hips, peppercorns, and fresh orange peels, then dry-hopped in the pinot noir barrel with Citra hops, and bottled with a cork-and-cage, in the manner of traditional Belgian beers. But let’s face it: if you made it there, you’re trying everything in sight.
HUMPY’S GREAT ALASKAN ALEHOUSE
610 W. 6th Ave. • Anchorage, AK 99501 (907) 276-2337 • humpys.com • Established: 1994
SCENE & STORY
The twin sister to Humpy’s in Hawaii, Humpy’s is a serious beer bar, but is by no means pretentious. It’s named for pink salmon, a species also known as humpback salmon because the spines of the males eventually bend (developing a hump) from the effort of chasing females upstream and back to their birthplace every summer. And it’s consistently busy, especially in the summer, when cruise ships bring hordes of tourists in and out of ancient fjords, so there’s really no time for attitude here.
It’s a casual place inside, with padded booths, an octagonal bar, and a back patio for king crab feasts when in season. Founder Billy Opinsky is thoughtful and polished, and stands somewhat apart in the land of unironic trucker hats and foot-long beards with his passing resemblance to a young Al Gore. Deeply involved with Alaska’s nascent craft beer scene from its early days, he has stocked the bar with fifty-five taps and fifteen bottled selections, with about half of the tap row consisting of beers from the state. The bar is known for good live musical performances from local and touring acoustic acts, and for unusual beer-tasting events during the big festival in January.
PHILOSOPHY
For beer lovers, by beer lovers. This is a classic good beer spot with no extraneous frills.
KEY BEER
Ask what’s freshest and taste tap beer to make sure lines are clean—a regrettable recent issue here. A dependable tap is Midnight Sun’s coppery Sockeye Red IPA (5.7% ABV), with a powerful, fragrant, and spicy hop character.
MEET ME on the BEER FRONTIER
THE GREAT NORTHERN BREWERS CLUB AND BREWERS GUILD OF ALASKA ANNUAL MEETING
For a small group of Alaskans, there’s an eagerly anticipated event that takes place each year at the Snow Goose Brewing Company’s early 1960s ballroom. Amid giant tapestries hung from the wood-paneled walls (polar bear, grizzlies, a unicorn), the Great Northern Brewers Club—a statewide organization founded in 1980 that appears to consist partly of fur trappers, Woodstock time-travelers, and Carhartt-clad loggers—calls itself to order, and simultaneously hosts the Brewers Guild of Alaska for its only meeting of the year.
This is a beer thing, of course, so it’s not exactly solemn. The 100 or so home-brew club members—some of whom were said to have bush-planed in from the interior—bring potluck dishes of chili (and one labeled simply “moose”) and coolers with beer, and gather around in circles of folding chairs.
I crashed the 2011 meeting, during which Jim “Dr. Fermento” Roberts (head of the state brewers’ guild, a separate entity, and a local beer authority for the Anchorage Press and the California-based Celebrator Beer News) took the little stage in a plaid shirt, khakis, and a pair of spectacles to read Important Announcements, which he unfurled like a scroll to the floor. It was a warm welcome to just about everyone in the room, including two “Beerdrinkers of the Year” (a contest held each year at Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver), representatives of most of the Alaska-based breweries, and the keynote speaker, Sierra Nevada’s Ken Grossman. Dr. Fermento wound it up five minutes later with the admonition “Drink responsibly; throw up strategically—make it count,” which provoked a laugh because Fermento seems about as wild as a ceramics teacher.
The introductions complete, Fermento passed around a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag; this was to collect donations for an injured community member. Next was Ken Grossman’s absorbing I-was-a-home-brewer-too talk; you could have heard a pin drop. For the rest of the night, Grossman, Alaskan Brewing Company founder and Guild “Lead Berserker” Geoff Larson, Fermento and others mingled as a few Big Lebowski–era John Goodman types in hunting vests and trucker hats discussed delicate brewing experiments gone amok in one breath, and tropical illness and Thailand’s phallic shrines the next.
Things were just warming up when the band took the stage. Clad in a Hawaiian shirt, Tom Dalldorf, publisher of the Celebrator, gamely led his Rolling Boil Blues Band in a rendition of “Home Brew,” to the tune of Clapton’s “Hand Jive.” As I wandered around and sampled beers of varying ambition—from good IPA to stout and then one pilsner that tasted, well, a little like cat pee smells—I got the sense that if it weren’t for this club, there would be no surging Alaskan brewing industry today (and thus no Guild), and that certain Alaskan citizens might never venture out of their snowbound cabins in the dead of winter, if not for the chance to toast each other’s hard work—and share some of that tasty moose.
MIDNIGHT SUN BREWING CO.
8111 Dimond Hook Dr. • Anchorage, AK 99507 • (907) 344-1179 • midnightsunbrewing.com • Established: 1995
SCENE & STORY
Under the watch of brewer Gabe Fletcher for twelve years, Midnight Sun emerged as Alaska’s most innovative brewery, and built a strong reputation in the Pacific Northwest for big, interesting beers. New brewer Ben Johnson has a tough act to follow, but he’s got plenty of training and a huge standing army of dedicated fans. And with a new brew-house and “the Loft”—an upstairs area with some fifteen to twenty taps, sleek metal tables and chairs, and polished cement floors—MSBC remains a top draw for beer travelers (and locals) every day of the week from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Note: Alaska state law forbids breweries without certain licenses from staying open past 8 p.m. or serving individuals more than thirty-six ounces, but package and growler sales help take care of that wrinkle.) Call for detailed directions or a map, as the brewery can be tricky to find. Once a month it’s First Firkin Friday, for which they feature a local artist and—you guessed it—tap a fresh firkin, a traditionally English bar-top, forty-one-liter cask of beer.
Beers with Years
Aged-beers might sound like a lark, but it’s not only wine and whiskey that can benefit from a bit of cellar time. Good beer is universally drinkable the minute it leaves a brewery, but, like a good dry-aged steak, time can add new layers of complexity to brews with a higher alcohol content—roughly two and a half times stronger than your average supermarket lagers. (They don’t improve with time, hence their “drink by” dates. Chug away.) There’s an array of styles that lay down well, including imperial stouts, English-style barley wines, Belgian lambics and other sours, as well as barr
el-aged and other strong beers. Alcohol by volume generally needs to be in the area of 9 to 10 percent to give the beer any chance of improvement, and the cork or cap should be in good shape to avoid oxidation, which gives beer a wet cardboard taste. Beers with Brettanomyces can continue to change in the bottle as the voracious single-cell organisms metabolize every last molecule they can find. Ultraviolet light must be avoided to spare a beer from the skunk effect, a more serious problem with green or clear bottles (as opposed to brown ones, which filter UV light). With the exception of sour-style beers, which often have little hop character, the process of aging mellows bitterness and aroma while deepening and accentuating malt characteristics, often drying out the last fermentable sugars and sometimes adding an acidic, vinous note that can pair well with desserts or certain rich poultry and beef dishes. Aging beers simply requires patience, the proper setting (a cool, dark place), and an open mind.
PHILOSOPHY
“We make a lot of crazy stuff,” says Midnight Sun owner Mark Staples. “We always try to avoid what everybody else is doing; we didn’t brew an amber for like ten years because Alaskan Amber dominated this market. Every brewer that works for me started on the bottling line and washing kegs. Not one of them is some fancy brewer from some school. As a result, our beers are a little bit unique. We just brew what we feel like brewing.”
KEY BEER
There are ten year-round offerings, including the flagship Sockeye Red IPA (5.7% ABV), four seasonals, five special edition beers, and several other one-offs and collaborations to try. Try the clove-y, creamy, Belgian-style dark Monk’s Mistress and Arctic Devil, a nutty, warming, complex barley wine (typically around 13% ABV) that has cleaned up at the Great Alaskan beer festival for years.
GLACIER BREWHOUSE
737 West 5th Ave., No. 110 Anchorage, AK 99501 • (907) 274-2739 • glacierbrewhouse.com • Established: 1997
SCENE & STORY
Glacier BrewHouse enjoys a superb location downtown and seems disconcertingly like just another high-end brewpub chain at first glance. But tastes of the beers (especially stronger styles, including eisbocks and barley wines, head brewer Kevin Burton’s passion) prove you’re in a special place. There’s an expansive menu of good food here, and a huge array of beers available, from clean interpretations of classic styles like IPA and stout, to wilder, bigger beers fermented in “the wall of wood,” Burton’s basement stash of fifty wine, bourbon, and other oak casks from around the world. A couple of yearly highlights are Burton’s Twelve Days of Barley Wine, leading right up into the Christmas holiday, with a different pair of aged barley wines on offer in the brewpub each day, and the Beer Train, a 100-mile train trip along the Turnagain Airm from Anchorage to Portage aboard an Alaska Railroad locomotive loaded with good beer.
PHILOSOPHY
Ambition is its own reward. “You’re always striving for that perfect one,” says Burton.
KEY BEER
Big Woody, an annual vintage-dated barley wine release. Using pricy English floor–malted barley and aged in various oak barrels including Jim Beam and Napa Valley wine barrels for a minimum of a year, it’s intensely malty with notes of vanilla, wood, cherry, and toffee, and usually about 11% ABV.
Juneau and Region
For a town that cannot be accessed by road—to get to Juneau, the state capital of Alaska, you must fly or arrive by boat—there have been a lot of firsts here. The state’s first big gold strike, in 1880, was close by. About a century later, the state struck gold again, in say, drinkable form. In 1986, Geoff and Marci Larson founded Alaskan Brewing Company—Alaska’s first brewery since Prohibition—in Juneau.
In all seriousness, consider a midwinter visit, not only to coordinate with the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival in Anchorage, held in mid-January, but also to get a sense of the authentic character—and characters—of the place. The millions of cruise ship passengers trundling ashore all summer long to gawk at glaciers and buy a plastic king crab refrigerator magnet have no idea what local dwellers are really made of. It’s in the winter you discover that even mild-mannered locals like Donovan Neal—comptroller of Alaskan Brewing Company—moonlight as alpine guides, leading winter climbs (and ski descents!) of Cascade volcanoes. You see the Larsons (of Alaska Brewing Company fame) and their neighbors up near the Eaglecrest ski area on Douglas Island, just across the channel, with huskies and malamutes volunteer training for catastrophic avalanche victim recovery. The sheer 3,576-foot face of Mount Juneau looms immediately behind town; a 1962 slide took out seventeen houses. National Geographic later pronounced it the city with the highest avalanche danger in America.
You won’t miss the sun and you sure won’t miss the crowds. And you’ve got incredible powder to ski; a mid-January weekday run to the excellent Eaglecrest ski area (a twenty-minute drive) can mean lift lines in the single digits—as in you and a buddy. And most of all, you’ve got great fresh beer to drink in atmospheric old bars like the Alaskan bar (since 1913). Gold rush, indeed.
THE ALASKAN BREWING CO.
5429 Shaune Dr. • Juneau, AK 99801 (907) 780-5866 • alaskanbeer.com • Established: 1986
SCENE & STORY
Geoff and Marcy Larson met while bouncing around in various national parks jobs in the late 1970s. “I was hitchhiking across the country during a summer off college and ran out of money in Montana,” recalls Geoff, who was previously more stably based in Maryland. He met Marcy, a Florida native with a photo-journalism degree, while both were working in Glacier National Park, where the two embarked on a “summer romance gone really wild,” recalls Marcy. By 1981, they were living in the Klondike State, dreaming full-time about opening a brewery for the locals, who seemed interested in high-quality imported brews but had no local options. A big Anchorage-based German brewery built during the pipeline years called Prinz Brau had gone under in the late 1970s; the Larsons felt they could succeed with something more, well, Alaskan.
They decided to go for it. With “no experience and no money of our own, nothing whatsoever” as Marcy recalls, and after thirteen stressful months of raising loans from various friends, family, and locals, the Alaskan Brewing Company became the sixty-seventh operating brewery in the United States and the only one in Alaska. It was 1986. The early days were rocky; Alaska’s economy was in the tank, and skeptics said they’d soon go under.
Not so fast. In 1988, Alaskan won the consumer preference poll at the GABF, and sales were rocketing. Today it’s the twelfth-largest craft brewery out of some 4,000 in the country (and still employee- and local investor-owned), manufacturing over 100,000bbl per year for seventeen states. The first brew (now the flagship) was their Amber, based on a 1907 purchase order for altbier ingredients a local collector had preserved from a long lost area brewery—smooth and full of caramel malt goodness, with a compelling, if faint, noble hop spiciness.
2 Marine Way • Juneau, AK 99801 • (907) 463-2630
Who needs a menu? At Pel’meni, a hole-in-the-wall Russian café in the classic old blue Merchants Wharf building down by the water, there are really only two choices—beef or potato (you want both). When you walk in, it’s just five little tables, a small counter, and a wall of vinyl records with an old record player spinning tunes (recent cut: Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s “Agua de Beber”). What you get for a few dollars is a Styrofoam box of piping hot, tortelloni-like Russian dumplings called pelmeni. Once steamed, they’re zipped around in a hot pan with butter and served with a dash of vinegar, cumin powder, fresh cilantro, a dollop of sour cream, and Sriracha sauce. There may never be a better late-night snack. And thankfully, it’s open after the bars close. (Juneau authorities: Please never, ever tear down the Wharf building or close this effortlessly perfect place.)
Today the brewery offers five year-round beers, including the Amber and two seasonals (Summer Ale, a superb kölsch-style brew, and Winter Ale, spiced with spruce tips, after the brewing methods used by Captain Cook to combat scurvy among his crew). All of them are made from
water out of Juneau’s glacier-fed aquifers. The tasting room is a charming affair, with free tours, nine taps, and cool old photos and memorabilia from the early days—all of it thanks to one hot, dusty summer gone wild in Montana.
PHILOSOPHY
High quality, eco-friendly, and unpretentious. “You have to make the best beer you possibly can for a whole variety of reasons,” says Geoff. The brewhouse utilizes a number of sustainable practices, such as the country’s first CO2 recovery system (which has become more common these days), a mash filter press (a system common in Belgium which reduces water and grain consumption without compromising beer quality), and a spent-grain dryer to prepare brewery by-products for shipping down to farms to use as feed in the lower forty-eight.
KEY BEER
Across the Gastineau Channel from Juneau lies Douglas Island, a seventy-seven-square-mile tidal isle with a sandy beach made of mine tailings. It’s the home of the long disused Treadwell mine, largest in the world in its day, and the vastly underrated Eaglecrest ski area, which has 1,400 feet of vertical (40 percent of it expert) served by four double chairs. But perhaps best of all, it’s home to the Island Pub, the ultimate après-ski pizzeria. With open seating, large picture windows, and a sleek square center bar area, it’s surprisingly contemporary, but entirely inviting. Built in what was once “Mike’s Place,” a quaint former dance hall dating to the 1930s, it’s updated now, but make sure to stroll around and look at the historic photos of patrons sashaying over the wood floors.