I don't see any wings.

Bloggers, I have noticed, tend to be fickle, capricious creatures with short attention spans, and I’m no different. After nearly 8 solid weeks of blogging about Canadian beer, I felt like a change of pace from the Ontario beer scene, and who can blame me? The arguments about difficulties producing craft beer in Ontario are pretty well trod at this point in time and trying to determine how to fix them tends to lead one around in mental circles. Even when new, exciting beers come out the rush to try them tends to mean that there’s a period of boredom with them before they’re widespread in pubs and the LCBO. Sometimes, even if it’s something like Smashbomb, which is really good, it’s hard to maintain excitement over the long term.

So what can be done to alleviate this zymurgical ennui? What can an itinerant canucklehead blogger do for a change of pace? The exact same thing every Ontario beer nerd with a valid passport has done since time immemorial: Shuffle off to Buffalo.

Yes, Buffalo: Where thousands of Canadians are lost each year trying to navigate the skyway, and more still attempting to find an open exit to I-90. A city where giant shopping mall complexes are named after environmentalist works by Thoreau. Buffalo! The Nickel City! Home of the chicken wing! Famous for its tire fires since 1988!

(Actually, if you ignore the pervasive roadwork, it’s a little like a more urbane Scarborough.)

Last month, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to email the organizers of the Buffalo Brewfest in order to see whether I could get a press pass. After all, I’ve been blogging for eleven weeks now, which makes me a pro by Fox news standards. I managed to get one without any real problem thanks to the kindness of the event organizers and also managed to organize a ride to Buffalo thanks to my Kingston correspondent. Undaunted by the fact that I’d be attending two beer festivals in two days I pressed on.

The truth of the matter is that for all that I hear about American beer while I’m talking to beer nerds and hanging out at places like Volo and the Beer Bistro, it’s been a long time since I’ve actually been south of the border. It’s entirely possible that the last place I ordered a beer in the US was Pickwick’s Pub in Stowe, VT and that would have been nearly half a decade ago, so my frame of reference is probably askew. The thing is this: We really only hear about the highlights from each brewery. To choose a brewery at random: Avery Brewing out of Colorado. I know that I’ve heard positively glowing things about the Maharaja Imperial IPA and the Hog Heaven Barleywine, but that’s only a fraction of what they do. They’ve got a series of ales available year round which make up the bulk of their product line and those are the things that are typically available at festivals. If there’s a Samuel Adams booth, you’re going to see their summer seasonal, not the Utopia, if you get my meaning.

Which presented me with a significant logistical problem: The 2010 Buffalo Brewfest was only four hours long and had thirty five breweries in attendance, some of which I had never heard of because they’re local to upper New York State. The other issue is that while the website had announced the breweries that were participating in the event, there was no mention of which beers the breweries would be serving, making it essentially impossible to formulate a gameplan.

I did the only sensible thing and emailed the participating breweries in order to figure out what was available, asking politely for them to suggest one or two beers that they’d be serving of which they were the most proud.  It actually ended up working pretty well, as I managed to get responses from: Ellicottville, Harpoon, Sly Fox, Great Lakes (the other one), Ommegang, Victory and Rohrbach. I was slightly surprised to find out that I was being taken relatively seriously, but then again time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

It’s one thing to have a plan, but it’s quite another to put it into action on the ground. In a setting like the Toronto Festival of Beer, where you know beforehand exactly what’s going to be on offer and you’ve tried just about everything before, you can streamline the process very effectively safe in the knowledge that it’s a large venue and that lineups will probably not be an issue. At the HSBC centre in Buffalo, it turned out to be a very different situation.  3500 people cramped into the lobby and courtyard meant that some booths were almost entirely inaccessible.

Graaaaains

The courtyard became essentially intractable by 6:30 meaning that a number of breweries were immediately discounted, and when I provide the list for you, you’ll understand just how crowded it must have been in order to dissuade me: Dogfish Head, Troegs, Victory, Erie, Stone, Ommegang, Sly Fox and Butternuts. It’s not very surprising that these breweries had the lines that they did as at least four of them are currently world class operations. Looking down at the courtyard from the second floor of the lobby was a great deal like looking at a George Romero film, what with the staggering and the moaning. (Q: What does a beer zombie want? A: GRAAAAINS!) It’s also no surprise that there was staggering. While admission included a 4oz sample glass, it also included 20 drink tickets which over the course of the event added up to four pints of beer for the diehard value-for-money types. Since most of the offerings were well over 5%, a certain amount of gentle swaying and stumbling was certainly called for.

This meant that we decided to stay inside, where the booths were dominated by slightly smaller, more local breweries. It also meant that I had to resort to plan B: Find the guy with the most interesting beer shirt and ask him what’s good. Fortunately, a pleasant man in a Cantillon shirt hove into view and I was quickly sorted out.