Ölmönger Special: Pub Winstonin Pienpanimo-olutjuhla, Pori, 11-12 August 2017

Suddenly the weekend in the middle of August was here again. The point of ending summer when the beer gods have decided to organize two beer festivals in Finland at the same time.

The funny thing is, that both of these festivals - Pub Winstonin pienpanimo-olutjuhla (Winston Fest) ja Kymijoki Beer Festival (KBF) - are organized in two remaining colonies of countries that don't exist anymore. KBF is held in Kouvola which is a colony city of the Soviet Union - or SSSR, Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, which I prefer. Winston Fest takes place in Pori that still mentally belongs to East Germany - or DDR, Deutsches Demokratische Republik, which I prefer.

This year in KBF they decided to take the festival feeling very near the perestroika, since they cut down the electricity and shut down the festival at around 8 p.m. on the second day. I chose Winston Fest, since I knew that things like electricity, clean water, food and personal hygiene could be hard to find under the Soviet rule. To be honest, probably the arriving thunder storm had something to do with the sudden closing of KBF but it's fun to play with the idea that there could be cities worse than Pori.

Actually, Winston Fest was my choice because of all the hip things DDR was associated with, whose spirit you can still sense in Pori, Finland. Like true freedom showcased by people transported to the other side of the city inside Beetle, Trabant and Wartburg engine compartments and clean sports showcased by female runners with baritone voice and chin moustaches and male discus throwers with four boobs and two dicks. If you miss the 80's and especially the fore-mentioned things from East Germany, Pori could be just the right place for you. Please visit our city in October-November or February-March to get the right feeling.

Enough with the crap. I picked my Seamchip card from where I had left it after the last year's festival and started my two-day visit. The rules and conditions were simple:

• Twelve Finnish microbreweries and one whisky importer were present - three breweries less than last year and no imported beers. The breweries had been changed a lot: some of the traditional visiting breweries had been changed to fresh breweries. There was also a food truck by the local restaurant Torero. The complete beer lists were available in Facebook and couple of days before the event.
• You could pay only with a Seamchip card, which cost 2 € - if you didn't have one from last year like me - and could be loaded with hop cones worth 1 € each. Prices were usually 3-4 € per 2 dl dose or 6-7 € per a bottle or a can (0,33-0,35 l). The card was still simple to use. The only problem (not mine!) was that the currency left in the card last year was missing though it was told to stay in the card.
• There was no actual entrance fee to the area and you could go out and get back in as many times as you wanted.
• You were given a new small pint with each dose, bottle or can you bought. No need to wash your glass after every beer, no useless souvenirs or returnables.
• The weather was sunny and warm on Friday and warm but cloudy with showers on Saturday, so the place was packed at 8 p.m. on Friday and rather quiet at 9 p.m. on Saturday.

So, pretty nice setting for spending two days in the festival area.

Making a long story short, the company - friends, neighbour dudes, workmates and beer fanatics - were all great. Started many good discussions and finished most of them. Also had surprisingly many great beers. Overtly shortened list of the best ones I had on either of the days for more than a sip is, in no particular order:

• Cool Head Better Hops Than Sorry: Starts with fresh citrus, some caramel malts in the middle, ends with dry piny bitterness. Excellent more West than East Coast IPA. 
• Linden Black IPA: Very fresh stuff with roasty start, biting citrus and bitter pine. My kinda India Black Ale.
• Moose On The Loose / Linden / Reittausblogi PoRa Sahti: Sweet banana hits it off with juniper. Some wheaty, yeasty and citrus hoppy flavour fits nicely in. Don't know anything about good sahti but this tasted great.
• Mufloni Azacca Pale Ale: Fresh grapefruit, some sweet citrus, too. Aftertaste has fruity and spicy resin. Worked with me.
• Mufloni HopfenWeizen: Yeasty bitter, some wheat and banana sweetness, citrus bites in the halfway. Better than the Schneider-Weisse version? Sure.
• Radbrew Argus: Sweet fruity malts with flowery honey-flavoured citrus. Strange IPA but the first beer from the brewery I liked to drink from start to end.
• Tuju Stout Export N:o 1: Heavy roast, strong malts. Cocoa, espresso and bitter finish. Tasty strong Stout.
• Tuju Idän Samee: Biting bitter start. Orange, grapefruit, lemon - a complete fruit juice. Pine in the finish. Very nice Finnish New England style pale ale.

By only one small sip, the four-brewery collab Cool Head / Maku / Pyynikin / Fat Lizard Can Can seemed really promising NE style brew. Unfortunately, they ran out of cans before I could have one full, so no notes taken. Last ones of Saturday were two superb Scotch single malts, Port Charlotte and Octomore 10, but they were ordered "for enjoying purposes only" - no notes taken.

All in all, the local festival felt great again. They should organize these smaller nearby beer events more often. But as long as Winston Beerfest takes place in Pori and I'm not somewhere else in the middle of August - like the Soviet colony town of Kouvola - I'm a sure visitor.

Ölbeat

After three great beer festivals this summer, started from SOPP Tampere, continued at Craft Beer Helsinki and ended here, and having an odd but fun Sober June, there's a long dark fall and probably a cold sunless winter ahead. Even though the summer wasn't especially warm, I'll be missing the summer sun. Only the East German landscape of Pori will stay.

Rammstein: Sonne (YouTube)

From the 2001 album Mutter, the song was written by Rammstein.

Ölmönger Special: Craft Beer Helsinki, 7 July 2017

I had already decided not to go to Craft Beer Helsinki (CBH) this year, since last year's memories were so beautiful, since I have a bunch of beer to be destroyed in the cabinet after Sober June and since - as every reader of this blog should know already - beer festivals are places not to go to because of A and B. However, a trustworthy old friend of mine, known as the Other Idiot, ruined my plan by offering his company for the event and a sofa to sleep on afterwards. You can't say no to that kind of kindness, can you?

So, off I went. The breweries of CBH came both from Finland and abroad - biggest names being BrewDog, Founders, Stone and - for the first time in the two-year history of the festival - Omnipollo. There were many craft breweries from Estonia, Poland and surprisingly Spain present, too. Since I've had some pretty good experiences with each of these countries, my plan was to push the big ones aside and focus on these three countries. And have some good Finnish craft beer on the side.

A view from when it started to get crowded

This was the second CBH ever, organized again by RH Events Oy, which was formed in 2016 by Helsinki-based gypsy brewery Humalove and event-organizing running school Runner's High. This year the event was held 6 - 8 July at the usual place, Rautatientori in Helsinki. There were 30 breweries and altogether around 250 beers present during the event. Entry to the festival with an ordinary beer glass cost 4 euros (with a tulip 5 euros). As the currency they used value loaded to a Seamchip card - like last year - that had a returnable deposit of 2 euros. The complete beer lists were available at Hanassa.fi site three days prior the first day of CBH - excellent work from the breweries and the organizers!

We - me and the Other Idiot - were at the scene on Friday at 12.30 p.m, half an hour after the opening. There was basically no queues, so we got straight to the counter and inside the area. No price lists were available beforehand, so that was checked first. The normal rate seemed to be 3-4 € for 15 cl and 5-7 € for 30 cl of beer but there was a lot of variation: the highest price for 15 cl seemed to be 6 € (Lehe Singularity, 18 %). Since we got excellent company on our table and good discussion, interrupted too many times by my stupid anecdotes, we spent more time in the festival we had planned. Despite the growing crowd from 4 p.m. on we got out as late as a little after 10 p.m., since we started to feel hungry and tired and didn't want to load more currency to the Seamchip.

Looked suspicious, tasted fine

This time we had to grab something to eat early, because we had missed lunch. Texas BBQ's pulled pork burger with BBQ sauce, friend onions and mayo tasted good and filled the stomach nicely for the upcoming beer challenge. Of course there was some festival extra in the price (10 €) but hey, it was a beer festival. Thanks to Keikyklubi for the recommendation.

The highlight of my festival - that will later be the lowpoint of a big bunch of other people's day - was being interviewed by a talented Finnish beer blogger from Bönthöö Bönthöö, an all-around guy of craft beer. We discussed shortly about beer, blogging and beer festivals and had a small dark beer tasting in front of the camera. Because the videos will be published later, I won't tell more here. I haven't shown my face in the blog or because of beer before, so this was stepping "out from the pint" for me. Probably my face will show up in the blog later, so all two and a half readers can truly scare the hell out of their kids or at least the annoying neighbour's stupid kids. In the end, I think the interview went well, mostly because of the professional grip of their crew. Big thanks and eternal hails! The link to the interview will be here as soon as it's published.

The beers - which will be remembered and which I'm trying to forget?

Let's start from the bottom, since the worst beer of my festival was easy to name. Sadly, it was the only one I took a big 30 cl doze of, when I got rid of the last 5 € on my card. Also sadly, the brewery didn't have either of my listed beers on tap on the moment, so I basically filled my glass by lottery. Well, this lot didn't win. The beer's colour started suspicions that I had picked a special sour ale - and I felt plain stupid. Indeed, there was a lot of sharp tartness and sourness of sour berries - more sourness than the used berries, blackcurrant and blackberries, naturally have. Then there was more tart and sour, sour and tart but nothing else. The whole party on our table tasted the stuff and judged it to "be an unbeer", "have something seriously wrong with it" and "belong to live in the sewer".

The worst beer of CBH and in a while

The diploma of the Skitbit brew in Craft Beer Helsinki 2017 goes to...

Tanker / Hiisi Silly Juice. If you see it, don't order it and never drink it. Just run.

Some short notes from the brews that were allright or good but didn't reach the top spots:

• Bidassoa / Boulevard Brasil: Stout with chocolate, pecan and pepper. Expected more from the ingredients. Decent roasted stout though.
• Deer Bear Blackout: India Black Ale with roast on top, citrus bitterness in the background and some harshness in the flavour. Nice.
• Jakobsland Dumbstruck: American Pale Ale as the first brew of the festival. Grapefruit and orange in the flavour as expected. Nothing wrong here, but the style is getting dull.
• La Quince More Brutal Than Session: Double IPA with bitter lemon and grapefruit. Quite fresh flavours, but needs more body. Tasty, still.
• Pinta Atak Chmielu: India Pale Ale with bitter caramel and biting grapefruit. Slice of earthiness spoiling the experience. Huge expectations, small disappointment. Got better towards the last sips, which is always great. 

Then to the better end of the brews. I had couple of Belgian-style strong ales or quadruples or something close to that style in the festival. Both went to the top 5 but not quite to the podium.

According to the head brewer and owner Tarmo Tali, Lehe Klerre doesn't fit to the quadrupel or any other beer style, since Belgian yeast, candy sugar and lots of hops are used brewing the beer. The brewery describes it as a black hoppy Belgian ale. Aroma has caramel, chocolate and alcohol. Taste gives heavy and thick malts, gentle sweetness and even elements of red wine ending with dry and strong malty bitterness. Unique, thick and tasty.

Bidassoa Nexus is described as a Belgian dark strong ale by the brewery and classified as a quadrupel. Nevertheless, aroma has sweet spices, fruits and some sourness. Taste gives sweet spices, raisins and malts with decent carbonation in the start, and it ends with sweet, malty and spicy aftertaste. Rich, spicy and good but not unforgettable.

The podium places were conquered by one style that was - surprise, surprise - Imperial Stout.

The bronze medal goes to Käbliku Penumbra Port Wine BA. By accident, I got a full doze instead of a half that I ordered - got the other half for free - but I wasn't offended. I've drank the basic version of Penumbra recently and liked it a lot, so there were high expectations. Aroma has wine, grapes and moderate roast. Taste begins with roasted malts getting mixed to port wine, coffee and dark chocolate. Aftertaste is fruity and roasty. Fine barrel-aged version that's not over-dominated by the barrel, even though I like the ordinary version a bit more.

The first place is shared by two brews - just couldn't put them in order.

Sori / Stockholm Sweet Mistress Brandy BA is a barrel-aged collab Imperial Stout with salted caramel flavour. Aroma has roast, chocolate, espresso and caramel. Taste has caramel and chocolate with salty roasted malts. Brandy bites in the end with roasty bitterness. Excellent by-the-book Imperial Stout with caramel and booze twists.

The Nightmare on the left, friend's Summer in Vermont on the right

Orava / Cool Head Orwellian Nightmare is a filtered no-screwing-around (= no tricks nor gimmicks?) Imperial Stout by Orava Brewing, a gypsy brewery from Turku, brewed at Cool Head Brew in Tuusula. Aroma has chocolate, espresso, roasted malts and some spices. Taste gives strong flavours of dark chocolate and black coffee with a moderate smooth roast. Aftertaste has nutty and oaky dry kick. Remarkable show of recipe and brewing skills from a newcomer brewer - this is their 2nd commercial brew.

A view from the start - the queue is born on the Omnipollo counter

Overall the festival felt well organized. The organizers had clearly learned from the mistakes of last year. There were no problems with queues or the paying system while I was in the area. The only queues spotted were to the Omnipollo booth and, after the area got crowded, to the Seamchip loading booth inside the area. The first one, queue to get Omnipollo beers, got me wondering the reason for the hype. According to some Finnish beer blogs, there had been even longer queues to Omnipollo booth in Tallinn Craft Beer Weekend in the beginning of May. In Craft Beer Helsinki, according to some festival visitors, the booth ran out of some most craved beers on Thursday, the first day, and some other beers on Friday, the second day. Most of their hyped beers seem to be gimmick dessert beers that have flavours that I simply don't want to taste in a beer, even though I like chocolate, ice cream, mud cakes, peanut butter etc. Possibly some serious adults can set their inner child free only in beer festivals, where they allow themselves to have as much dessert as they want, because outside the fence it's completely forbidden. I don't know - anyway it seems stupid to stand in queue for average tricky beers when there are good quick and slow ones available straight away.

To compensate the fact that I had none beers with a huge wow factor in CBH, I was lucky to have the best company of the event - both in my home table and in the interview. Next year, the presence of the right kind of people in the event will be more crucial than the breweries and the beers available. That's what beer festivals like CBH are really about, right?

Ölbeat

After a long break, heard this song one day. "I don't know what you do / but you do it well / I'm under your spell." Fits exactly to my thoughts, when I left for this beer festival, though I knew I shouldn't have.

Duffy: Mercy (YouTube)

From the 2008 album Rockferry, the song was written by Aimée Ann Duffy and Steve Booker.

Ölmönger Special: Suuret Oluet, Pienet Panimot - SOPP Tampere, 25 May 2017

Only in Finland one can give a beer festival an unimaginative name like Suuret Oluet, Pienet Panimot - that's Great Beers, Small Breweries in English. Check the pictures below, if you don't believe. Luckily, the festival is known by its abbreviation SOPP, and the name is probably only thing that's completely wrong with the event. If we try to forget that everything and a little more is wrong with beer festivals.

Looks and sounds stupid but it's good for ya!

The SOPP festivals are organized by Lammin Sahti, best known as a Finnish sahti brewery. The main idea is to have couple of Finnish microbrewery assemblies around Finland during the summer. Traditionally and also in 2017, the tour starts in the end of May in Tampere. Next in the turn of June and July is Lahti - the original city of the event since 2002. Then, in the end of July, the festival hits Jyväskylä first and the next weekend it's time for the "main SOPP" in Helsinki. Turku gets its festival after a couple of years' break in the middle of August, and the newcomer Oulu is last in the beginning of September. Every festival lasts 3-4 days, so there are plenty of chances to attend the event. I wonder, how I've managed to avoid the event so far.

But because Thursday the 25th of May was the Ascension day and the next Friday was a clear out-of-office day, we - the neighbour gaffer and I - had decided to have a non-family trip to Tampere. We arrived to the venue one hour after the opening at 1 p.m. - to avoid the entrance fee (from 6 p.m. 10 €) and the evening crowd. After choosing and buying a decent beer glass with 4 € - not the thick traditional pint and not the "Excuse me, I'm a craftbeer hipster" one deciliter tasting glass - we got our rally started with a handful of other people. No waiting lines in sight - great!

Each of the 30 breweries present had their stand inside the U-shaped serving tent area. The breweries had different number of their beer brands available on tap - some had 3-4, others 6-8. Altogether there were over 200 different brews in the event. There were three kind of serving sizes available: 4 deciliters' "large" (7-8 euros), 2 deciliters' "small" (3-4 euros) and 1 deciliter's "miniature" (1,5-2 euros). Also, there were bottles to be bought, priced around 5-7 euros, and some ciders and sahti available. There was also a food corner with decent-looking and overpriced burgers and snacks available.

Our adventure in SOPP Tampere ended around 7 p.m after ten "small" ones. The venue puffed up from people from 5-6 p.m. and we had tasted enough by then. All in all, the festival seemed well organized. One piece of nagging, though: the shitty substance of Salmiakki Koskenkorva doesn't belong to a beer festival. I don't care who has blended the shit, but it seems pretty awkward to see a waitress dressed like a gypsy tramp walking around the audience selling shots of teenage drinking contest liquid. The contrast between quality beer event and the "getting totally wasted" kinda booze just struck me in the eye. No, I didn't buy any, thanks for asking.

Enough with the crap about the arrangements and other miscellanous stuff. Let's start with my personal top 5 of the few tasted beers - first the brews from #2 to #5 in random order.

Mallaskoski Nemesis 2nd/3rd(?) Edition

Aroma has dark fruits, roast and sweet rye malts. Taste strikes with a fruity boozy kick - sweet caramel malts and fruity roast continue. Strong and sweet cognac barrel-aged imperial rye wine.

Cool Head Brew Summer in Vermont

Aroma has mango, orange and pineapple. Taste is dominated by fresh citrus fruits that turns from bitter to sweet. Some herbal and piny flavours. Powerfully fruity aftertaste. Fresh and very drinkable Vermont/New England style Double IPA.

Sonnisaari Mustasalmi

Aroma has orange, mango and sweet liquorice. Taste lifts off with the union of sweet roast and bitter fruits - grapefruit dominates. Dry, bitter and roasty aftertaste. India Black Ale at its best - heavy roast meets bitter citrus.

Bryggeri Helsinki Colorado Blond

Aroma has yeast, sweet fruits and banana. Taste has yeasty citrus, sweet wheat malts and banana. Finish is fruity sweet. Very nice Belgian-style White IPA - wheat and yeast give the brew some special character.

And then - drum roll - my personal Number One of the event:

Maistila Riutunkainalo

Aroma has sweet roast, black coffee and chocolate. Taste starts with thick and sweet roast. The Belgian yeast shows up, but is drowned under the roast, alcohol bite and chocolate. Aftertaste adds some bitter liquorice. Awesome! Excellent Baltic Porter with a Belgian twist. 

Other good or at least decent brews I had were Hiisi Maailmojen Sota II, Tornion Panimo Pilsner and Beer Hunter's Mufloni CCCP IPA. The two mandatory misses were Hopping Brewsters Thora (too much berries and "natural additive" sourness for me) and Ruosniemen Baltic Porter Cuban Coffee Edition (otherwise OK BP but there was an unpleasant side flavour - oldish keg?).

Ölbeat

Great beers, small breweries. Good times? Definitely.

Chic: Good Times (YouTube)

From the 1979 album Risqué, the song was written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers.

Ölmönger Special: Beer events - worth the expectations?

Last time I wrote laughably bitter chapters (1 & 2) about not visiting the beer festivals, the reason was simply that I didn't have the chance to go. Like any Finn - at least any Finnish politician - I thought that what others got but I didn't was taken away from me, and turned the table around so it would seem lucky for me for not having the chance. If that convinced someone, there's a serious need for a therapist for that someone.

This time I'm probably making myself the one in need of therapy by arguing that I had the chance to attend OlutExpo on 28-30 October 2016, but I gave it up. Not because I have something more important to do. Actually I do, now, but's that's not the point of this post. Not because I think that visiting the event would have been a terrible waste of money, time, shoe soles, tastebuds, patience and tolerance for seeing human herds and for hearing stupid trivial shit all around. Well, it would have but that's not the point of this post. The reason is that I'm slowly learning that the chain of high expectations (E), long anticipation (A) and huge disappointment (D) is not for me.

This is how it could have started...

It's not just beer where I hate the EAD chain. For example planning and execution of traveling is another. Our family trip* from last summer is a good example - planned for months and saving the supposed highlight for the last. Eventually the planned highlight, Legoland Billund, turned out to be overhyped and overpriced spoiled amusement park for both the kids and the adults and the lowpoint of the holiday week. Everything else that was planned at most within a week before the trip's start turned out to be great fun. The reason? The EAD chain. (The rainy day in Legoland wasn't.)

Another nice example is sex in a long-term relationship. You both wake up in the realization that there were probably mammoths and dodos on the face of the Earth the last time you fooled around. You pick up your calendars, cross out "that period of the month"**, Mondays, days that your kids have hobbies, days that you have to have common-law relatives or so-called friends visiting, cleaning days and other unsuitable days. Finally, you find that one day couple of weeks later empty and mark it with a pink heart. Then you start planning and organizing of having something romantic for the evening, a nice dinner, candlelight, non-Barry-White music, whips, chains and outfits - you know the drill. Finally, when the actual moment comes, sex isn't great. It's possibly not bad but it would've been better in the moment when you first thought about the extinction of species. The reason? The EAD chain. (No. It's not me, the Omega male.)

...but instead it went this way...

"All right. Very interesting to read about that. But what's the connection between traveling, sex and participating a beer festival?" I hear you asking. Think, dummy, and wait for the bulb to light up. Since it's obviously gonna take more than a little time I'll explain it shortly: OlutExpo is the main beer orgy of the year for beer enthusiasts in Finland with some hundreds of different beers available, many unavailable before and after. That's the rare Finnish sex part. And even though Helsinki and the capital area cover almost 20 % of Finland's population, over 80 % of Finnish people live elsewhere. I know that not all of the Finnish hicks are bulk lager drinkers, and since they live a bit further, they have to travel to the venue in Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki. That's the usual Finnish travel part. Still no light? Sure you can read? If yes, sure you can think? Never mind, let's get on with the story. The other reader is getting bored.

This fall, I had planned to take part in the festival just like I did last year. Already scouted for low-cost bus schedules, made enquiries about sleeping on a friend's couch and even asked the same friend about reserving the Friday and possibly Saturday for beer occultism. Then, a month left to the first day of the event, a disturbing question crossed my mind: is this really worth the fuss? Waiting and planning the visit for some hours? Writing down must-have lists of 35 beers? Traveling three hours per direction? Ruining the whole event checking out what to have next? Wasting couple of days in the limbo of recovery and thinking "Oh, that one was over quickly"? For an overpriced and overcrowded beer event? To get another fine experience of the EAD chain? Fuck no. Instead I noticed that my beer storage's "Getting empty in 1 month" light was flashing and immediately got rid of the problem: at least the lack of good beer doesn't steer me towards OlutExpo. Money well wasted.

I judged my decision as excellent last Friday - a week before the event - when I saw the almost final list of OlutExpo's beers (pdf file). Check it out yourself and yell, if you find something interesting.*** [Hearing just white noise.] Right. Jesus, what a disappointment then and eventually a bore till death it would've been if I had bought the tickets for the event and for the bus beforehand. No, the improvements in the food offerings won't help here, since I wouldn't have traveled there to eat in the first place.

...and ended like that.

So, I could jump in a plane just like that and travel for a holiday to the other side of the world on a very short - say couple of hours - notice. Except that the Significant Other wouldn't be happy, I would ruin my family life for years or probably for good or at least the locks of my home would be changed. Surely, the chain of events from a flirting eye contact, a seducing lick of lips and the exchange of one or two necessary finishing words to wild and spontaneous sex in 10 minutes could be nice for a change. Except that I'm not a porn actor. And in addition, the censorship organ of my own fantasies takes into account my personal qualities: my age, looks, charm, flirting skills, sex appeal and - in the case someone actually thought that the original idea would include the Significant Other - the somewhat unelectric state of my current relationship. The censorship organ doesn't even allow that kind of shit to be presented even in my own brain.

But, I can almost always without planning pick couple of bottles/cans from my beer stash and enjoy them in the terrace, by the fireplace or just sitting on the couch staring at the opposite wall or TV, if I really want to be bored. Almost as quickly, on couple of hours' notice, I can call a friend or two and organize an evening of a pint or two in a local pub and have some oh-so-necessary social interaction while drinking classy beer. So, what's the irreplaceable need that participating in a mass beer event fulfills? Need to get more EAD chain experiences in life? No, thanks.

Someone might suggest: "But hey, you can go there just for fun. Without planning. Spontaneuosly. Get in and grab whatever you like, you know?" Thanks for the answer with a jolly positive attitude, but I can't: it's against my nature. And I'm not Superman, you know: I don't travel the 240 kilometers from Pori to Helsinki and back spontaneously just for fun without planning. So shut the fuck up and shovel your smiling merry advice back to your ass where it came from.

Ölbeat

Of course, the only person I can blame for the mishab of not visiting OlutExpo this fall is me. Since I still believe, that there's a damn good beer out there for Paranoid, I'm settling for this song you can dance to in Kaapelihalli this weekend. I'm away, so get totally wasted from good brews & drams and have some serious fun!

Gnarls Barkley: Crazy (YouTube)

From the 2006 album St. Elsewhere, the song was written by Brian Burton and Thomas Callaway (credited for samples: Gian Franco Reverberi and Gian Piero Reverberi).

* Yes. I'm aware that family trip seems to be a bad example, because you think that they are always horrible. Of course they are: your family has to travel with you. I would also think that traveling with a family would be a subject of Stephen King's next trilogy if I had to travel with you. I would be the first person to get possessed and jump off a moving car in Golden Gate Bridge.
** I'm not The Oarsman of Red Rapids. Am I picky?
*** For clarification: "interesting" doesn't mean the same as "haven't ticked that". For tickers there are probably dozens of new beers available. Since I'm not a ticker i.e. a God but rather a mortal earthling, I haven't been able to understand what's the actual idea of doing a neverending list of rated or drunk beers. There are beers to remember but most of the already-had beers you can forget. But I accept the fact that my capacity is limited.

Ölmönger Special: Pub Winstonin Pienpanimo-olutjuhla, Pori, 12-13 August 2016

So they organized a beer festival in da hood. Pub Winstonin Pienpanimo-olutjuhla, translated in English like Microbrewery Beer Festival @ Pub Winston a.k.a the Festival, was organized the 4th time on 12-13 August 2016 in Pori. Because the Festival came to my courtyard instead of things going the other way around as usual, I was obliged to visit. Spending both days there wasn't necessary, but doing only what you have to is boring, isn't it?

Seamchip card looks like this and will work next year

The setting was like this:

• Around 15 Finnish microbreweries were present with couple of beer importers and a small whisky booth. Guess there was something to eat available but once again, I wasn't there for the food. The complete beer lists were available in Facebook and Olutopas forum couple of days before the event.
• You could pay only with a Seamchip card, which cost 2 € and could be loaded with hop cones worth 1 € each. Prices were 3-4 € per 2 dl dose or 6-7 € per a bottle (0,33-0,35 l). The card was made easy to use with special reader stands and there were no problems at all with paying. 
• There was no actual entrance fee to the area and you could go out and get back in as many times as you wanted.
• You didn't have to carry your glass around the area but were given a new small pint with each dose or bottle you bought.
• The weather was sunny but windy on Friday and at first rainy and then warm and sunny on Saturday, so there wasn't particularly crowded before 9 p.m. on neither day.

Shortly put, the setting was damn excellent for tasting some good beer.

First ones of Friday...

My top picks from Friday were:

• Fat Lizard Sweet Mary 390 - Biting double IPA with strong bitterness and tasty fresh grapefruit. 
• Hiisi / Ruosniemi / Maistila BIPL Thumpr - Collab India pale lager with Brettanomyces yeast had sour lemon at first and then tasty bitter grapefruit.
• Maistila Moood - Damn good milk stout with tasty dark chocolate, cocoa and coffee as the dominant flavours.
• Pôhjala Must Kuld Kenyan Coffee - Already excellent porter enhanced with delicious strong coffee, roasted malts having their word in the game, too.
• Pyynikin Barley Wine - Named by the brewer as Young Girlie, this one had sweet malts, nice bitter berriness and a promise to taste even better later in fall.
• Ruosniemen Vuorineuvos Tullibardine Single Malt - Barrel-aged version had the roasted coffee and chocolate flavours of the original imperial stout and then a thin layer of Highland taste on top.

On Saturday, the sun showed up a bit late

On Saturday, these were the most tasty ones:

• Beer Hunter's Mufloni Barley Wine - Heavily bitter first bite followed by tasty fruit, toffee and strong malt flavours. 
• Fat Lizard Arctic Fuel - Fruity and light bitter IPA with orange aroma and juicy grapefruit flavour.
• Hiisi / Ruosniemi Konttorirutto #3 - Sour Nelson and Mosaic hopped saison with moderate sourness and rich fruity-yeasty flavours.
• Pôhjala Virmalised GF - Tasty IPA enhanced with fresh grapefruit, luring mango aroma and fruity bitterness.
• Pyynikin Imperial Stout - Very tasty and massive brew with strong roast, coffee and bitter flavours perfectly in their place.
• Ruosniemen Lomittaja -  Simply delicious saison with citrus sourness and sharp-tasting yeast.

The tasting board picked Pôhjala Must Kuld Kenyan Coffee as #1, Pyynikin Black IPA as #2 and Maistila Moood as #3 beers of the festival after blindtasting. Taking nothing away from these three, I would've liked to see one non-black and unroasted beer among the best three. The audience voted Pyynikin Black IPA as #1 and Hiisi/Ruosniemi/Maistila BIPL Thumpr as #2 beers of the festival. Both Kenyan Coffee and BIPL Thumpr were sold out after Friday, so I was lucky to have tasted them pretty early. 

Head brewer Tuomas Pere telling that Pyynikin Käsityöläispanimo goes America.

There can be exceptions...

While sipping on Saturday, I also was honoured to meet and discuss with couple of beer tickers. Shortly defined, ticker means "a person that compulsively tastes new beers or checks them off his (endless) list". Some tickers rate every beer they've had and even re-rate already ticked beers. Compulsive or not, I think of ticker-raters with more than 5 000 ticks at Ratebeer as creatures, who should be worshipped and offered virgins as sacrifice. Why so? Simply put: there wouldn't be any place for lazy people like me to go and check, whether a beer should be great, good, mediocre, drinkable or crap without them.

Despite their god-resembling status these two ticker legends seemed to be laid-back people with some great stories to tell about their quests while hunting pints. They ought to be much better objects of worshipping than gods, since they probably prefer a nice pint of barrel-aged barley wine over a human sacrifice. So, if you're having god and beer ticker as your career alternatives, choose wisely and become a ticker. No one would be crucified, drowned or torched alive because of your hobbies, at least.

...but seriously - not! Get in the sea among the other know-it-all beer people!

Ölbeat

For some reason or another, my friend for Saturday had "Party in Pori" in his bucket list. It was his decision to end the night in a place with a dance floor. So, finally we ended up in a club with the middle age at middle age and a DJ playing 90's Eurodance classics. It was this song that turned the guy into a poor man's Travolta.

Haddaway: What Is Love (Youtube)

From the 1993 album The Album, the song was written by Junior Torello and Dee Dee Halligan.

Ölmönger Special: Craft Beer Helsinki, 1 July 2016

While having a small break with the blog - when there's a choice between writing crap about beer & music and enjoying Finnish summer & life, I'll choose the latter - I got a chance to visit Craft Beer Helsinki a.k.a. CBH from now on. Since I'm probably not the greatest fan of beer festivals (see the previous posts on the subject here and here), the list of the breweries got me breaking my habits. Most of the Finnish summer beer festivals have the emphasis on Finnish breweries, but CBH had lured roughly the half of the breweries outside Finland. Some pretty known big names like BrewDog, De Molen, Founders and Stone and many unknown European microbreweries turned out to be a temptation I couldn't resist.

The start: De Molen Bommen & Granaten

To cut the crap of personal excuses and explanations, some short facts about CBH. The festival was organized first time ever on 30 June - 2 July at Rautatientori in Helsinki by Helsinki-based gypsy brewery Humalove and running school & event organizer Runner's High. There were 23 breweries present - each having a selection of 5-10 beers available mostly on tap. To get inside the festival area you needed to pay 3 € for a glass (or 4 € for a tulip as I did) and load some money to a Seamchip card which was the only acceptable payment device in the event. There were couple of loading points where you could increase your card's credit as well as couple of glass washing and free drinking water tents in the area. Also there were many reputable street food shops present, which is an exception in a Finnish beer festival, and a craft cider corner. The complete beer lists were available at CBH's website and the festival had pretty often updated Facebook pages.

Having heard about the first day's problems with the payment cards at the entrance and the resulting queues, I was at the scene when they opened at 2 p.m. Since "Only cash payment" line as well as the festival area were practically empty I got in quickly. There were no price lists of the beers available beforehand, so that's what had to be checked first. The normal price rate seemed to be 3 € for 15 cl and 5-6 € for 30 cl of beer but there were few cheaper and many more expensive brews available: the lowest price for 15 cl was 2 € and the highest 5 €. The prices of cider and food didn't catch my attention, because I was there for the beer. And meeting a long-time-no-see friend by a pint or some, and enjoying the sunny Finnish summer weather. At 6 p.m. I got out, since the place started to get packed with beer-thirsty people and I had spent enough time and dimes sipping small doses of good stuff.

Beer festival at Friday afternoon in July. Oh, the crowd! :)

What do I remember, that is: which beers were harder to forget than the others?

Both of the barley wines I had, De Molen Bommen & Granaten and Beer Hunter's Mufloni Barley Wine, were quality stuff. Bommen & Granaten as a heavy start had sweet fruity malt flavours with silky smooth bitterness. Mufloni Barley Wine had more malts and bitterness and less sweet fruits but didn't pale in comparison.

Spanish India pale ales Bidassoa Basque Larrun and La Quince LLIPA! tasted nice and were positive surprises. Larrun was a hoppy and fruity imperial rye IPA with strong malty and grainy character. LLIPA! was a fresh-hopped American-style IPA with moderate grapefruit. This experience convinces me that I'll have to get to know more about Spanish craft beer.

The most uncommon beers I had were Founder's Mango Magnifico and Hopping Brewsters Grimr. I tasted Mango Magnifico purely out of curiosity: a strong fruit beer with mango juice and habanero chilis is so out of the box for me, that it made me to get out of the box. And I got happy - thanks to sweet mango over-domination and habanero afterburn. Grimr on the other hand is an ancient gruit ale spiced with juniper, orange peel and cardamom. Like Starkadr, the darker gruit from the brewery, Grimr also has a fresh combination of slight sourness and strong spice. Works for me - would say that it was my festival fav brew.

 

Founders Mango Magnifico

Stone's Arrogant Bastard BBA and Americano Stout ought to be superb brews. However the weather was clearly wrong for enjoying a strong ale with a grip of oak and vanilla (Arrogant Bastard BBA) and an American imperial stout with surely delicious coffee (Americano Stout). Excellent turned to decent. My bad - have to taste these again in the darkness of Finnish autumn or whenever I get the chance.

To wrap it all up, the event felt and tasted quite nice. Most of the beers were good or very good: nothing mind-blowing but nothing tasteless or bad-tasting either. The prices of the beers were mind-blowing, meaning too high: asking 3 € for 15 cl of IPA and 5 € for same volume of barrel-aged imperial stout is utterly greedy. But it seems that in the Finnish craft beer market it's still seller's market: people seem ready to pay high price to get something that actually isn't so rare in Finland anymore. I must say that free drinking water was a big thumbs up for the organizer.

As a proof of still missing some political correctness or good taste towards the beer festivals, I must compare the squirrel logo of the event to something completely different. On the left in the pic is the event's logo from an empty tulip. On the right is the logo of Finnish bank Kansallis-Osake-Pankki, KOP (National Share Bank) which was merged to another large Finnish bank in the 1990's and which was later sucked into the Nordea group. I can see the similarities in business in the logos, can you?

Black, blue, where do these squirrels come from? ;)

Since I took only few bad pics in the event, there are more and better pics and also better stories available in these Finnish blogs:

• Arde arvioi
• Hankala asiakas
• Keikyblogi
• mushiMALT
• Oluttoverit
• Punavuori Gourmet
• Tuopillinen (who this time drowned in the depths of beer haikus. Another Mango Magnifico would help him up. ;) )

Ölbeat

After a beer festival it's time to get back to real business. Let's forget the taps for a while:

Calvin Harris (ft. Tinie Tempah): Drinking From the Bottle (YouTube)

From the 2012 album 18 Months, the song was written by Calvin Harris, Patrick Okogwu, James F. Reynolds and Mark Knight. 

Ölmönger Special: Why should you avoid beer festivals? Part 2: People

In the first part of this two-part miniseries about the reasons to stay away from beer festivals and events, we discussed the things:

• how much money you lose by attending
• why the beer selection can't attract the consumer and
• what makes the events predetermined "must-have" and in fact unworthy experiences.

"Going to the BeerFest? It's a bit crowded here..."

Since things are usually simple and understandable you can easily pass them, just accept that you spend a fairly large sum of money to a limited amount of non-special beer and a trivial experience at its best and buy the ticket. That's why we have take a look at the complex and illogical element of the beer festivals: people.

* * *

Let's start with the minority: the people behind the counter. The brewers or their representatives are there because they want to get the audience to know their products, thereby add the demand of their brews and thereby make a better living. For that goal, wasting a couple days by pouring drinks to and babbling nonsense with more or less drunk customers is quite inefficient. Hearing the same stories of people's experiences of either their brewery or previous events, the same praises of their beers, the same taste descriptions and the same "I love beer, people, everything" rants again and again gets boring quickly. The time and the money would be much better spent at the brewery improving the beer recipes and brewing more and better beer, and then making the salespeople work for their salary by expanding their products' market area. Quitting not only attending beer festivals but also whining about the legal obstacles of practicing their profession would show progressive thinking.

The organizers tell us that they're "taking the beer culture forward" and "bringing beer people together". Well, even though we're living in a society polluted by social media, people still get together, drink better beer than ever and so the beer culture develops by itself without artificial and superficial polishing. The organizers get away with a nice profit with low costs and without serious effort, so the fairytale pays off very well.

* * *

Then we get to the audience. The crowd. The beer people. You and your 1 357 so-called friends. The real problem.

First, there's always too much audience. I somehow understand how people gather to concerts, sport events, public lectures, riots and even Sunday service, since there's something like the agenda. But in beer events there's not, since brewers, honored guests or so-called beer experts having a word or two of stupid trivial sh*t that no one is even remotely interested in, does not serve the purpose. There's just beer, not particularly special beer, as we noticed in the previous post.

Not enough beer, but decent glasses per people ratio

Second, most of the people are wasted: they either lose their plan to control their drinking or don't even have that plan in the beginning. That makes them canned faster than Carlsberg. When they become drunk, they get noisy and annoying. Unluckily it happens to be that way, that the people who tend to have some control on their drinking are noisy or at least annoying enough even when sober. So, what else can you do with these people than start drinking your brains and feet out.

* * *

Of course, if there were just a lot of people getting drunk, that would basically be a typical night at the pub. A ridiculously large pub with a ridiculous number of people inside, to be exact. But no: it comes to who the people are - too many are craft beer hipsters. The definition of craft beer hipster: an occasional beer drinker, who flies with the beer trends and changes his own ones just for fun. If you tell that you drank and liked a beer that the hipster recommended you last week, it's already out of fashion. If you tell him that you liked a beer that he doesn't know or hasn't tasted, he's seemingly annoyed and can't admit to have liked it after having it a week later. The hipster's behaviour and appearance are another story, but that's not worth further exploring.

In addition to the hipsters there are two smaller beer-drinker groups that bug you to the bone when seen in beer events. 

First one is the raters: those beer enthusiasts who seem to feel obliged to give each beer they ever drink a score. Sadly they do it in beer events, too: scratch their heads, make notes and give points with their smartphones or notebooks. Probably saving the notes and points in UnTappd, PintPlease, RateBeer, BeerAdvocate or some other rating database. While having their 25th different 1 deciliter sip of the day. My mouth would be pretty out of the game after five sips of different beers, and with a small dose like 1 dl (3,4 oz.) I have drunk the damn thing before it shows it true nature. Probably the raters have more stamina and speed in their mouth. However, the comparibility between beers hasn't got any credibility if done in a beer event. Somehow I've come to the conclusion that credibility isn't the word that should be attached to beer rating at all, since whether you like the beer a lot or not is eventually decided by your own mouth..

The other sad minority group often seen in beer events is the bloggers, self-centered bastards who write about beer and probably even rate it with descriptions in the Internet. These guys and girls aren't able to have fun in a beer event. They're constantly taking pictures of the beers that they drink and writing notes about them. So they're bad and boring company and should be avoided. After the event each of them publishes a blog post describing similar things: how they arrived to the event(!), the beers they tasted, the bad food they knew to be bad but still ate, the people they saw(!!), heard (!!!) or spoke with (!!!!), the overall mood they got from the event and some words of hindsight about the place, the prices or the organizing they call criticism. In the worst case, someone has got the "great" idea to have a blogger meeting before or during the event. Jesus, what kind of anticlimaxes of life, thought and discussion they must be.

The fun part in the event posts are the beer rankings or the descriptions of the beers, because the diversity of consumed beer isn't usually just a couple, rather 15-30 different brews. Basically describing the beers after losing the senses of sight, smell, taste and time and ranking something in an order during or after has the same problem as the rating does: you can't trust the descriptions or rankings at all.

* * *
       
You find blog posts about Tallinn Craft Beer Weekend in these Finnish blogs: Brewniverse, Humalablogi, Keikyblogi, Punavuori Gourmet, Tuopillinen, Tuopin ääressä (also the trip), Tyttö ja tuoppi and Vaahtokruunu.

On the other hand these bloggers spent a minute or two recollecting their memories of Helsinki Beer Festival: Arde arvioi (1st day & 2nd day), Bönthöö Bönthöö, Humalablogi, Kaunis humala, Keikyblogi, Maistuva mallas, mushiMALT (1st day & 2nd day), Pari sanaa oluesta, Tuopillinen and Tyttö ja tuoppi.

If you get sad when you can't understand texts that are utter crap, then sadly these all are in Finnish. After saying that, I must admit that I kinda liked the travel post that Johnny Rio at Tuopin ääressä made about his trip to Tallinn: I don't know what and how many mushrooms he ate while writing but I'd like to have the same.

Now I hear some colleague blogger cry out: "How can you call my blogpost on Halapaluuza Tap Party crap?" Well, darling, let's say I've actually read your blog and compared the level of your event posts to the level of your normal posts. You don't actually raise the bar by carving sculptures from extrement after writing mostly good and even some excellent stuff, do you?

I see the confusion in the colleague's face but then a victory smile: "But still: how can you call any blog posts crap? You write worse than the rest of us. Your Ölbeats are from the deepest sh*t sewer tunnels that no one of us others has ever had nightmares about." Exactly, honey. You're learning.
     

Special Ölbeat

I shouldn't be picking on people, people are not bad. People are shiny and happy:

R.E.M.: Shiny Happy People (Youtube)

From the 1991 album Out of Time, the song was written by R.E.M. The song is hated even by the band itself. I would probably give this track one to the top spots of the most annoying and redundant songs ever. It fits perfectly to this continuum of meaninglessness.