Local winners at Great American Beer Festival

Great American Beer Fest names Chicago’s top brews wrote:Several Chicagoland brews came home with medals from the recent Great American Beer Festival, the largest commercial beer competition in the world....

Wondering what LTH beer drinkers think of the winners, which included brews from Goose Island, Flossmoor Station, Two Brothers and 3 Floyds.

LAZ wrote:

Great American Beer Fest names Chicago’s top brews wrote:Several Chicagoland brews came home with medals from the recent Great American Beer Festival, the largest commercial beer competition in the world....

Wondering what LTH beer drinkers think of the winners, which included brews from Goose Island, Flossmoor Station, Two Brothers and 3 Floyds.

Goose Island 312 is a pretty basic wheat beer. A nice transition beer for those that are moving from macros to micros. It's not one of my personal favorites. This is available year round in bottles and on draft just about anywhere.

Goose Island Bourbon County Stout is a barrel aged imperial stout. When brand new this beer can be quite a monster, very boozy. The bourbon can overwhelm the flavor at times and it's a definite sipping beer. As it ages, that hotness from the alcohol begins to die down and the flavor becomes a lot more complex. While this is one of my favorite beers any time, in my experience 2 years is when it really starts to get good and will continue to get good for years after that. The 2006 I had earlier this year was the best one. This is released once a year in 4 packs and 22 oz bottles, usually in November. However, you can usually find bottles throughout the entire year due to the higher price tag. Some of the better beer bars will have this on tap every once and a while.

Flossmoor Station Pullman Brown is classified as a brown ale, but it borders on porter territory as well. As someone that does not enjoy brown ales that much, Pullman Brown is one that I really do enjoy. It's well balanced, hints of caramel, roasted malts and coffee are the dominate flavors in this one for me. You can find this at most of the Binny's and other decent beer stores, although the best place to get it is at the brewpub itself. Distribution has been spotty up until the last 6 months, so some of the stuff in stores might be old and without dating on the bottles you can't tell if it's new or old.

Two Brothers Domaine Dupage is a biere de garde style beer. It's a fairly standard version of a biere de garde. It's pretty good, not my favorite beer from Two Bros, but a decent option. Flavor usually includes caramel malts, some tart fruits and a little bit of yeast. Easy to find at Binny's and other beer stores.

Three Floyds Munsterfest is an Oktoberfest/Marzen style beer. I haven't had this one before as this is a style that is generally too sweet for my preferences.

I think wimperoo has answered pretty definitively, I agree with basically everything he said up to and including not having tried Munsterfest yet and not being a huge fan of Oktoberfests (though we generally have a party around this time of year where we try as many commercial varieties as we can. I don't think anyone has managed to bring a Munsterfest yet) I'm a bigger fan of brown ales than tw but agreed that Pullman Brown is a good one.

wrt the Goose BCS, a few years ago it would hit shelves and be gone within a week. Then in 2008 it seemed like they made way too much of it and it stayed on shelves forever (I think some stores may even still have some 2008 available, I've seen it recently anyway). Now they're doing some more interesting variations on it too, like Vanilla BCS and Coffee BCS. These variants end up being pretty highly prized and disappear from shelves as quickly as the standard BCS did a few years ago. Anyway, I'm a huge fan of this beer and I can't recommend it highly enough. Big boozy Imperial Stouts have been popping up like crazy the past few years but this one may be the best of the lot.

I just don't get how 312 is classified as an "English-style summer ale". I didn't think wheat ales were too common outside of Germany and the States. Does the GABF assign categories or is up to the brewery to identify the correct category?

Not to say ditto to the above, but... ditto. Goose's BCS is a tremendous beer. According to the online release calendar, the Vanilla BCS is due out in October and the Rare BCS (whatever that means) in November. If they're anywhere near as good as the Coffee BCS, we are all in for a treat.

FFF's Munsterfest isn't really up my alley, but it's a huge departure from what many expect of FFF (ie. hop bombs). It's brewed pretty traditionally, if I recall, in spite of their slogan (It's Not Normal). For lagers, I prefer their Jinxproof, but that only seems to be sold out of the brewery. Their Gorch Frok, which is sent out to retail, leaves a lot to be desired, IMO.

I know a lot of local brewers went to the GABF (at least based on Twitter feeds). I'd be curious to see what others submitted for judging. Goose also submitted their Sai-Shan Tea in the experimental category, but that's all I've read about.

danimalarkey wrote:I just don't get how 312 is classified as an "English-style summer ale". I didn't think wheat ales were too common outside of Germany and the States. Does the GABF assign categories or is up to the brewery to identify the correct category?

Not to say ditto to the above, but... ditto. Goose's BCS is a tremendous beer. According to the online release calendar, the Vanilla BCS is due out in October and the Rare BCS (whatever that means) in November. If they're anywhere near as good as the Coffee BCS, we are all in for a treat.

FFF's Munsterfest isn't really up my alley, but it's a huge departure from what many expect of FFF (ie. hop bombs). It's brewed pretty traditionally, if I recall, in spite of their slogan (It's Not Normal). For lagers, I prefer their Jinxproof, but that only seems to be sold out of the brewery. Their Gorch Frok, which is sent out to retail, leaves a lot to be desired, IMO.

I know a lot of local brewers went to the GABF (at least based on Twitter feeds). I'd be curious to see what others submitted for judging. Goose also submitted their Sai-Shan Tea in the experimental category, but that's all I've read about.

I was under the impression that the brewers can enter their beers into whichever category they want, and I thought someone told me they could be entered into multiple categories. Not sure if that's true or not though.

I had Vanilla BCS at FOBAB last year and it was delicious. Can't wait for the bottles to come out.

Rare BCS is BCS that has been aged for 2 years in 23 year old Pappy Van Winkle barrels. So the Rare part comes from the barrels they were aged in. Word is that about 7k-8k bottles will be released. Lots of rumors about the price point, anywhere from $30-$100 a 22 oz bottle, with most reasonable guesses around $30-$40.

More big ups to Bourbon County Stout! I got to do a free 'vertical tasting' of three years' worth of it at LUSH two winters ago, and it was revelatory. I never knew how much aging could affect and sophisticate a big beer like that.

Thanks for the commentary. I'm not much of a beer drinker (I've decided that it's because I don't really like the flavor of hops), but I'm nonetheless fascinated by the growth of microbrews, especially locally. Chicago may yet return to some significance as a brewers' town.

Have you given Belgian-style beers a shot? Their hop profile is much lower than other styles of beer. Also, the darker styles like porter and stout have very little hop flavor to them. Heck, the Octoberfests tend to be on the sweet side, too, but for people who don't generally like beer, doing a taste test of Belgians is usually the way to go. A lot of them don't even taste like beer (which is why I tend to prefer other styles. I like a bit of hops.)

At any rate, all four breweries mentioned in your OP are very well regarded in the beer-drinking community (Two Brothers probably less so than the other three, but that's some stiff competition they're up against. 0Ratebeer.com's member ranking lists Three Floyd's as the number 2 brewer in the world, Goose Island #18, and Flossmoor Station #24. Two Brothers doesn't make their Top 100. Note that seven of the top 20 on that members' list are from Great Lakes states.) Yes, we could use a few more breweries in the area to really develop as a Brewer's town, but we have a solid footing as it is.

Binko wrote:all four breweries mentioned in your OP are very well regarded in the beer-drinking community (Two Brothers probably less so than the other three, but that's some stiff competition they're up against. 0Ratebeer.com's member ranking lists Three Floyd's as the number 2 brewer in the world.

Note that the number one brewery in that list has a partnership with Chicago's Pipeworks Brewing.
http://www.thelocalbeet.com/2010/04/07/ ... ian-roots/

Binko wrote:Have you given Belgian-style beers a shot? Their hop profile is much lower than other styles of beer. Also, the darker styles like porter and stout have very little hop flavor to them. Heck, the Octoberfests tend to be on the sweet side, too, but for people who don't generally like beer, doing a taste test of Belgians is usually the way to go. A lot of them don't even taste like beer (which is why I tend to prefer other styles. I like a bit of hops.)

Yes, I've enjoyed Belgian lambics, particularly the fruit beers. Not so fond of porter or stout. Basically, the more like beer something tastes, the less I'm apt to like it.

When I was young and hung out with a beer-drinking crowd, I sometimes ordered a shandy or lager and lime (fortunately for me, the group's favored bar was a European-style pub), but despite trying, I never developed a taste for what you might call regular beer.