James III reviews the Barley Wine Festival 2007.
Toronado Barley Wine Festival 2007 review
Submitted
by James
J Reilly III
Toronado Barley Wine Fest
James III spends a
cool Valentine's Day at the Barley Wine Festival in San Francisco. Now
that's sensible romance.
There are many wonderful ways to
spend Valentines Day. Some
enjoy a candlelit dinner, a walk in the park holding hands or even a
cleansing
ritual involving burning love notes, books, that pair of underwear your
ex
left at your house and other flotsam and jetsam left from
the flood of
failed
relationships.
For the lover of beer who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, however, there can be but one destination. San Francisco's Toronado Pub on Haight Street. On Valentine's weekend, the Toronado holds its annual Barley Wine Festival, a veritable orgy of beer swilling coupled with strangely unaggressive beer snobbery.
For the uninitiated, barley wine is beer's crazy old grandpa. It ferments longer, blesses us with unbridled alcohol content and tends to be a bit fruity. It does not care about newfangled brewing technologies such as frost brewed lining or keg cans. All it cares about is being exactly what it is and that consists mainly of being strong, heavy and delicious.
So it is no wonder that a gathering celebrating one of the most exclusive and hard to find of beers brings people out of the woodwork. When you arrive on the morning of the event (people begin lining up at around 8am), the first task you must accomplish is to get an all-inclusive barley wine list. The double-sided list details scores of the barley wine by name, how much alcohol they have, their original gravities and home brewery. All told, a smorgasbord of barley wine offerings.
Of special note are the hometown
brews of Magnolias Pub
and
Restaurant, a scant mile away from the Toronado, as well
as the entire
class of
barley wines that are aged in whiskey barrels.
The barley wine is sold by number and size making the whole transaction feel a bit like I'm a stock trader on the floor of the New York Stock exchange. "Numbers twenty-three through twenty-nine medium and a large twelve!"
Now as is the case with all beer fests, at the Barley Wine Festival there are about 75 million other beer lovers all vying for the same bar space. This can become a problem, so be prepared to fight your way up to the bar and then stay there. You risk getting beer spilled on you as patrons grab their orders with all the skill of a three year old parking a bus in a compact parking space, but you can always just order another beer to cope.
That being said, the crowd, while drunken and unruly, lends itself to endless conversation, including but not limited to:
Where you both are from;
Questioning what number you are drinking;
Discussion of how intoxicated you both are;
Asking if you've tried the shwarma, pizza or sausage place
yet;
Complaining about getting beer spilled on you;
Making fun of people;
The pros and cons of the Socratic Method;
Laughing uncontrollably.
After all that beer drinking, philosophizing and battling to get your order, you are no doubt all tuckered out and in need of some non-liquid fuel. Well, my friend, you are in luck; the area around the Toronado has some of the best restaurants in a 20-block radius. My personal favorites include Rosamunde's Sausage and Pepper Grill, and Ali Baba's Cave. Rosamunde's serves, oh I don't know, eight billion different types of sausage and pepper sandwiches, including rabbit and wild boar varieties that cannot be missed, while Ali Baba's Cave easily serves the best Middle Eastern food on the continent. Usually I go to at least two of the restaurants and split the proceeds with fellow Barley Wine Festival-goers.
This yearly event has completely redefined Valentines Day for me; once you have attended the Toronado's annual Barley Wine Festival you will never look at that day the same way again. No longer owned by chocolate and flowers, Valentine's Day is now and forever shall be just another conquest of the ever-expanding Beerpublic. Long live the Beerpublic.
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