United Nations of Beer

Great American Beer Festival

by Lucia Novara
(Beer Delegate, CO, USA)

Great American Beer Festival 2006

There are some days when heaven seems a long way off. Your boss discovers your Internet porn collection, your dog eats your favorite pair of underwear, or you discover after all these years that the mole on the back of your neck was really a petrified Junior Mint stuck on by an older sibling while you were in the cradle.

Those kinds of days you think that maybe there is no Ultimate Happy Place, that maybe this is all we get.

Well, I'm here to tell you its closer than you think. Yes, there is a Heaven here on Earth, and it appears like a vision of an oasis once a year on the high desert plain of Denver, Colorado. I speak, of course of The Great American Beer Festival.

There is no preparation for entering the Colorado Convention Center in the last weekend of September. It's a place usually reserved for such unholy business as tapings of Wheel of Fortune and Garden Gnome Conventions. But on that magical weekend, the Great American Beer Festival transforms it into a fairyland, where the lights are dim and people are adorned with garlands of pretzels.

I was so lucky as to attend this epic event with four stalwart drinking buddies, each one thirstier than the last. We entered the room armed with tummies full of sub sandwiches, wrist bands and plastic cups with marks at one ounce.

The sight in front of us was overwhelming. Literally as far as the eye could see there were tables with pitchers lined up, just waiting to be tasted. The official stats include 347 different breweries and 1,600 different kinds of beer. We didn't even know where to start; we just knew that the Great American Beer Festival was a special, special place.

There were new kinds of beer, old favorites, special brews that hadn't hit the market yet, beers so light they melted on your tongue and brews that were so dark you needed a spoon.

The breweries were arranged by region and, as we wandered from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast, we stopped again and again to get our one-ounce portions of Heaven.

The Great American Beer Festival crowd was an amazing mixture of young and old, respectably coiffed and severely mulleted, outrageously costumed and outrageously tanked. In one instance, they came together in the form of a guy in an Oompa-Loompa costume, who was being escorted out for drinking the rinse buckets.

There was a large majority of men and a few women came dressed to impress them in mini-mini skirts and four-inch heels. They seemed to have missed the fact that they were going to an event full of drunk men, which any girl with a head on her shoulders would have known meant that they could show up in sweatpants with vomit in their hair and they would be a hot commodity.

Working this angle, my lady friends and I discovered why God gave women breasts. Here all this time I thought it was to hold up cocktail dresses, but their true calling is to elicit heavier pours from brewery representatives.

While there was beer, beer everywhere, it takes a lot of one ounce pours to elicit that special state of being party-goers everywhere aspire to: the one where you're the funniest person in the room and the pink elephant in the corner is giving you the glad eye.

Us girls managed to speed up the process a bit, much to the chagrin of our male counterparts. At one point we got our hands on giant foam hats shaped like beer mugs, but immediately discarded them when we discovered that they made the Almighty Great American Beer Festival Pourers give us less brew.

As we wore closer and closer to Last Call, there was a general air of feeding frenzy and anyone who dropped a cup of precious, precious beer was shamed by a crowd-wide "Boooooooooo!"

When the final buzzer went off (yes there really was a buzzer... It was loud. Very, very loud) we ambled out of the building and squinted into the night, which seemed considerably brighter than the dimness of the convention center.

There was only one thing left to do before we returned from The Big Hops Field In the Sky back to reality; a visit to Arch Angel Manuel's corner to buy a burrito from his street-side cooler.