Festival Season D.I.Y.

By Dick Cantwell

Like a free press, ownership is the only assurance of control where beer festivals are concerned. We in the Washington Brewers Guild are these days thrilled finally to have taken the reins of our Father’s Day weekend festival. For many years they’ve been in the hands of a couple of outside parties whose interests, shall we say, didn’t always mesh with ours, and at long last we’ll be doing it ourselves and gaining the rewards attendant on the responsibilities.

Ever hungry for power as well as tireless in the pursuit of a good time, we within the tighter focus of Elysian have long held that the best festivals of all are the ones we put on ourselves. Practically since we opened we’ve been coming up with themed events to showcase our beers and those of our friends, as well as to further local beer culture by assembling interesting groups of beers and throwing a party. The Belgian festivals we’ve held have been a lot of fun, pouring perhaps a dozen drafts new to the market, and for years our winter beer fest, where we pour our favorite Northwest Christmas beers on a Saturday in February, has been one of our busiest nights of the year.

But a year or so ago, we came up with a way to have a bigger night yet. One night as we sat drinking something probably strong and hoppy, my business partner Dave and I were talking about how ridiculously popular our pumpkin ale had become. Having begun as a 4-barrel seasonal novelty batch a few years before, it had grown to a 200-barrel schedule-dominating behemoth. One of us joked that we were going to need a new production facility just to brew pumpkin ale; then the other suggested that we have a festival devoted entirely to pumpkin beers, ours and our friends. Neither of us can quite remember who had what thought when, but what a ridiculous idea! But then we brewed an Imperial pumpkin ale to mark our 1000th batch and there was no turning back. With a starting gravity around 20 degrees Plato and over 250 pounds of pumpkin in an 18-barrel batch it set a new standard for ludicrousness. And people loved it. They drank it, they hoarded it, and they asked when we were going to brew it again.

When I did brew it again, this time just as a 3-barrel seasonal novelty, I suffered one of those fortuitous mishaps that forever alters the course of history. I missed my gravity, ending up with a pumpkin ale of considerable, but definitely not Imperial strength. In order to make the beer I had set out to make, I would have to try again; and so, with our regular pumpkin ale already in the mix, we had three. How much of a stretch would it be to brew a few more, talk to some friends about getting a keg of this or that for the week before Halloween, and have a go at our ridiculous festival idea?

So was born our first annual pumpkin beer festival. To the three similar spiced pumpkin ales we already had I added a pumpkin hefeweizen, Bavarian-style if not exactly Rheinheitsgebot-approved, an unspiced, orangey-colored pumpkin lager, and a pumpkin stout with a touch of cinnamon. We got kegs of pumpkin ale in from Cambridge Brewing, Dogfish Head, Big Time, Rock Bottom, Santa Barbara Brewing and New Holland Brewing. We also did a pumpkin-conditioned ale, primed and spiced in the pumpkin, a big sixty-pounder. Sealing it was the big challenge, since I hoped for at least a modicum of carbonation. We used agar agar as a kind of glue, stainless steel screws, and wax, remelting the latter with a heat gun if it cracked.

So we’d put the whole thing together. Would people show up? We had people waiting to get in when we opened and a line out the door for ten hours. We had people carving pumpkins on our loading dock and kids running all over the place. At an appointed time I tapped the pumpkin with an English-style tap and a mallet and we poured the beer without closing the spigot until it was empty. The fest broke our busiest-ever day record by nearly forty per cent. And the crowd was incredible. Everyone was in a great mood, and we had a lot people there who had never been in before. We decided it had probably been a success.

So with a few changes we did it again the following year—this past October—and again broke our record. This year people came in costume. We also did it the week after at our new stadium district location, with its own pumpkin conditioned smoked porter in one of those big white pumpkins. I brought back a couple of favorite beers from the first year, and added a pumpkin dunkel hefeweizenbock, a pumpkin common beer, the pumpkin smoked porter and a pumpkin lavender saison. In the future I’ll put out a suggestion pumpkin for ideas for future festival beers.

And the idea is spreading. I’ve heard of other pumpkin-conditioned beers being poured around the country, and a pumpkin Randall-style dispensing system. Our festival isn’t going to get any smaller, either. We’ll probably end up closing the street and doing it outside, with a celebrity judging, and more guest beers. I think we should get the mayor to tap the pumpkin. Maybe it should last a week, and the schools should close. Maybe we really will open that pumpkin-only brewery. Maybe I’ll write the pumpkin style book.

The point of all this, aside from showing the ridiculous lengths to which we’re willing to go with an idea, is that you can build a festival, or at least some kind of festivity around practically anything. The Brewers Association has caught on to this, with the Poor Richard’s Ale a lot of us brewed last year to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s tercentenary, the Repeal of Prohibition beer idea, and more recently, the Thanksgiving beer and turkey thing. When I heard about that we scheduled a beer dinner and I brewed a chestnut brown ale and a winter-weight wild rice ale. It’s nice, I have to say, to have a small satellite system to do some of these things without committing to general release.

Other ideas? Oh, I don’t know. Every time I turn around these days, it seems, there’s a new movie or play about a spelling bee. What about that? Kind of like the trivia contests a lot of bars put on. It could be all beer-related words—vicinal, saccharomyces, that kind of thing, maybe. Or maybe not. In any case, let me know what you come up with.