Notes From the First Annual St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival

The festival was an impressive affair. Under great white tents festival volunteers pulled beers brewed by area brewers. Nearly every beer style was represented to varying degrees of success. The tents serving beer were divided between lager and ale. There was another tent where beer pairing presentations were conducted by various chefs from the St. Louis area.

For the most part there was only one brewer per style available. There were, of course, exceptions such as a number of breweries who brought their dry stouts. But in the lager tent each one of the breweries had available a style called St. Louis Dark Lager. This was a special beer produced for the festival as a tribute to the early St. Louis brewers. The brewmasters were each presented with the same list of ingredients from which they could brew their version of St. Louis Dark Lager. I’m loathe to offer tasting notes from any beer festival as this it not the most conducive atmosphere to focusing on the qualities or short fallings of a particular beer but here goes. Most of these dark lagers were clear, chestnut brown. The nose ranged from non-existent to some grainy malt. Their flavor was mostly malty with some balancing hops mercifully present in a few of the breweries’ versions.

It will be interesting to see how the good beer community receives the Heritage Festival in the coming years. Craft beer brewers and lovers are generally suspicious of Anheuser-Busch and any connection to the monolithic corporation will likely give many pause.

But the festival attendees didn’t seem too concerned about any connections to big beer. Indeed, the people that I saw were pretty typical of a beer festival crowd. The ale tent was packed while the lager tent only held a moderate number of beer tasters. Plenty of people were cramming their noses into their tasting glasses to study the beer’s aroma before even considering a sip. There were reports of drunkenness but I didn’t see too many sloshed participants. And, of course, there was the obligatory collection of kilts. This is an interesting phenomenon unique to beer festivals in my experience. I never see men casually wearing kilts except at these events.

Overall, this was a very nice beer festival. I’m encouraged to see an event put on by one of the biggest of Big Beer making such a clear distinction between ale and lager and devoting a great deal of the physical space and festival resources to beer and food pairings. The good beer revolution has made some impressive progress.