Got a nice little picture from Chris over at Left Hand taken at the Left Hand brewery during the brews cruise a few weeks back.
For all you that joined this great beer experience, I can say again thanks to everyone and
"bira, bira, bärs, bärs, mera öl, mera öl"to you all that maybe remember the "Swedes" noisy "song".
One of the best beer experiences I have had took place before GABF actually started. We first heard about the brews cruise through Jugge over at OT a few weeks before we went over to Colorado and something that we are very glad that we did not miss.
The Boulder Country Brews Cruise is a event arranged by the good people over at Left Hand Brewery and this was the second year that they arranged it. The concept is simple, for the bargain price of 40 bucks you get a t-shirt, a arranged bus that will take you to 4 different interesting breweries in the Denver area, breakfast and lunch, plus a bunch of lovely and interesting people to join you on the beer cruise.
Everyting started out in morning outside the convention centre where GABF was held in central Denver. A full bus of people started the journey for "breakfast" and the first beer of the day. Together with the normal beer crew we also got good company with the people from OT and Akkurat (local pubs in Stockholm). So we had a great group of people from Sweden to acompany the rest of the Americans on the bus.
First stop was Boulder Beer outside Boulder, a brewery with great beers like Mojo IPA and Hazed & Infused. We got some breakfast and the opportunity to check the brewery with a short brewery tour. Boulder Beer is really a pioneer as a micro brewery in the US if you recon that it started out so early as 1979. At that time the only existing micros was anchor in san fran and a few others. So its fun to see that the brewery is very lively and continues to produce new and exiting beers.
The journey continued and we ended up in Longmont and the Left Hand Brewery. We were met by Eric Wallace who is the founder and brewer of Left Hand. We all met him when he visited the Stockholm Beer festival in September and when we had a tasting round together with him at the OT booth.
So this was the second time we met and it was fun to actually meet him at his own brewery and hometown of Longmont. The beers were all excellent as they alway are. Had a amazing cask version of the milk stout that you could drink all night long, seems that this stout is getting better and better in my mind.
Together with the Imperial Stout also on cask this was probably the best beers we had during the beer cruise.
Jugge and the rest of OT gang disapeared during the end of the visit to Left Hand, so we had to leave them behind. 
Seemed that they got the opportunity to have a additional sampling somewhere at the brewery, it was told that it was something new and exiting that Eric sneaked out of the brewery!
Next stop it was time for the Pumphouse Brewpub in central Longmont. Here we got lunch and a new beer of the day. What I remember I had the porter, which is quite nice as a beer, and very traditional to the style. Seems that Pumphouse is doing a full range of beer styles and is very focused on English style beer and following that tradition. A nice place for food and sports if you are into that. 
The OT gang got back to the bus through the help of Eric W and a couple of Mountain Beer Mixers that was later passed on through the bus (which increased the mood on the bus, so when we later arrived in Lyons and Oskar Blues we had started to learn the Americans on the bus Swedish beer songs, or something, :-))
Last stop for the day was Oskar Blues over at Lyons which is really where the mountain region starts, so it is a very exiting place and a great place for such a amazing brewery. Located in a very small building, you here have a brewery, restaurant, bar and blues club. 
We got some great beers (Oaked Gordon!) and got the oppotunity to check out how they handles the cans (yes, if you do not know it, this brewery makes all the beer in cans). 
They now even has put their great imperial stout in a can, which is really a great idea, so I bought a 4-pack of the Tenfidy imperial stout to take back home. 4 amazing beers for the amount of 10 bucks, that is really a bargain.
Spent the last hour of the beer cruise at the outdoors terrace with a pint of OB and did not want to leave. You could probably have been sitting there for the rest of the day but the bus was leaving, so we simply had to leave and get the last pint of OB Pale Ale with us on the bus.
With some additional Swedish beer songs and some explanations about who we were at the front of the bus we continued the journey back home to Denver. Seems that everyone on the bus had a blast during the day and if you ever go to GABF I really recommend to get on the bus, this is really a good start of the festival and in some sense this was even more fun than the actual festival.
Also thanks to "J" over at The Beer Hermit blog for taking a nice picture of us when had the beers over at OB in the sun.
More pictures from this amazing day can be found here;
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| GABF07 (Left Hand Beer Bus Cruise) |
This years US-beer list at Oliver Twist was amazing like always. But one of the better news was the arranged beer tasting that we stumbled upon when we passed the VIP-corner at the Oliver Twist booth. Jugge at Oliver Twist simply asked if we wanted to attend the Left Hand tasting, and that sounded interesting. It was hosted by the founder himself (Eric Wallace) that started the brewery in 1993 over at Longmont, Colorado.
It is always fund to hear how a brewery was started and how it came to be that a guy like Eric just thought that being a brewery could be fun. If you reflect on the fact that 4-5 of the big selling beers were all invented so early as 1994 (first beers that come out from the brewery), it is an amazing story and success. As a new brewery it take a while to find you style but here we have a brewery that already at start made amazing beers, and have sticked to them.
One fun story that Eric told us was the fact that Sweden had something to-do with him being a brewer. In short the story is that Eric traveled together with his wife on one of the big ferries across the Baltic Sea (between Sweden and Finland) back in 1991. On the boat he tasted a new beer as he normally does, this was a goal for him, simply to taste as much of new beers he could where ever he traveled. He found a strange new bottle of beer that he could not recognize, and thought that this was great, a nice ale that was so much better than the lagers on draught that was available. So he checked the bottle to see what kind of beer it was and was surprised to find that the beer was from the US. What he had tasted was the first ever beer for him from Samuel Adams! He thought it must be an English beer and was so surprised and exited that it was a beer from his own country that he decided that if these guys can create good craft beers in the USA he must also do it!
Jugge over at Oliver Twist is a large sponsor of beers from Left Hand and the beers are almost ever available at OT. And now this will be even bigger when the Milk Stout will be available at 200 stores through our own Systembolaget (state owned shops where all strong beer are sold). So it will be interesting to see if the Milk Stout could challenge the big hit beers of North Coast Red Seal and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale at Systembolaget.
How about the tasting, well it looked like below;
1. Left Hand Sawtooth Ale (nutty, caramel flavors followed by herbal earthiness of hops)
2. Left Hand Jackmans Pale Ale (hopped pale ale with a solid malt foundation)
3. Left Hand Milk Stout (Classic cream stout with addition of sugar mellows)
4. Left Hand Black Jack Porter (Dark chocolate & espresso and smooth clean finish)
5. Left Hand Oak Aged Imperial Stout (Unfiltered Russian Imperial Stout, smooth with raisins, coffee & dark chocolate)
6. Left Hand Oak Aged Imperial Stout (draught version) (Even more smoother, a classic)
All amazing beers and my personal favorite is still the Imperial Stout. But as a classic pale ale a newcomer for me was the Sawtooth Ale, a very drinkable beer and its not difficult to understand that this is the number one selling beer from Left Hand.
Jugge from Oliver Twist and Eric during the tasting.
It will be interesting to visit the brewery during the GABF-week in Denver. We are all looking forward for that and hopefully meet Eric again, at least he told us that we were welcome to visit them.
UPDATED 2007-09-25
I made a mistake so I was caught on picture during the tasting, here is the proof; Over at Ofiltrerat. That was really not expected, :).
