Harvest Moon Festival Beer Tasting,

September 26th, 2013, Farmington, MI

We really enjoyed last year’s Harvest Moon Festival in downtown Farmington, so I had my eye out for the advertisements.  It was the same pattern as last year, with a beer & wine tasting on Thursday night, a dance Friday night, and then a kids family fun event Saturday afternoon.  We decided to go with the Thursday night tasting event.  It ran from 6 – 11 pm.  We got there around 8:00, and there were a lot of people there.  It wasn’t crowded or anything, but definitely a lot of people.  This year they had expanded to take over the full Riley park square in downtown.  Last year, they had the pavilion and the area south of it.  This year, they took over the grassy area north of it as well.

They had the same arrangement of beers under a tent on tap with maybe 2 or 3 beers from a brewery all mixed in along several tables, with volunteers doing the pouring.  The area next to the tents had a number of tall tables for standing/leaning, while resting your drink on something.  Wine was under the pavilion.  Schoolcraft College had their Culinary School students putting on the food.  This had doubled in size and they had several different entrée options, plus some desserts and sides.  We shared both the pulled pork on a pretzel roll, and the chicken soft tacos.  They were awesome.  On the grassy side of the pavilion, they had some tables and chairs set up- both under the open sky and under a large tent.  They also had 3 small campfires set up with hay bales & chairs surrounding them, and a guy singing and playing acoustic guitar through the sound system.  He was very good.

Same as last year, the evening was perfect weather for being outdoors.  That early fall, where the nights are just starting to turn chilly, but not downright cold.  There’s a freshness in the air you can feel and smell, and it makes it nice sitting outside.  The campfires were new this year, and they were very cool.  They were small portable fire pit things and they had a big common pile of firewood.  Each fire pit had its own bucket of water, I guess in case the fire spread to the hay bales or something.  I was amazed when someone announced they thought the fire needed another log and then walked off over the pile on the side of the park, grabbed a log, and brought it back and put it on the fire.  I was amazed that the wood was freely acceptable, and that there wasn’t like some kind of official “fire tender” person who’s job it was to put wood on the fire.  I’ve been too long exposed to the “nanny state” of things, where to protect everyone from even the remotest possibility of doing something that might injure yourself, you’re prevented from doing it in public.  Of course to protect themselves from all of the maniacs out there that sue someone because they can, and they can get a ton of money for it in the process.  I can be as crazy, stupid, and reckless as I want to be in my back yard, but once I go in public, I guess I’m just used to turning off my brain and not having to think about making decisions about something that might hurt me.  Anyway, realizing we were being treated freely like responsible adults, it was great.  Almost thrilling even.  We picked firewood ourselves, decided when to put it on, when to adjust it, etc.  It was almost the highlight of the evening.

But since I didn’t go there to make a campfire, I suppose I should talk about the beer.  They had about 65 different beers, ciders, and meads on tap.  Maybe 1/3 of them were Michigan beers, 1/3 were craft beers from out of state, and the last 1/3 was some from the bigger brewers- domestic and international.  It was a fun mix.  We enjoyed reading the “craft-beer-like” descriptions of Molson Canadian and Pilsner Urquell.  We got to try a Sam Adams specialty brew that we heard is only available on draft.  Unfortunately(?) it was delicious.  This of course is unfortunate because that means I can’t go buy it at the store in a 6-pack and enjoy it at home.  But I did enjoy it at the festival.  I also got to talk to the local Michigan sales rep of Epic Brewing (based in Utah), so I heard a bit of the back story to their new beer they brew in Colorado.  Apparently Utah beer laws don’t allow brewers to have a taproom with their own beer in Utah.  So they built a taproom in Denver, CO so they can serve their beer on draft to their followers.  Interesting.  They gave you a little 3 oz. plastic taster mug that you could fill for 1 ticket ($1).  Or if you paid 5 tickets ($5) you could get a 12 oz. clear plastic cup filled with your favorite.  That option obviously isn’t the budget-wise option, but as fun as it is, you do eventually get tired of drinking your beer out of oversized thimbles.  However, I stuck to the ticket-at-a-time game with my miniature beer mug.  That way I got to try more beers.  Below is what I tried, and my ratings for each:

5 Stars

• Epic Escape to Colorado, Epic Brewing Co
• Lagunitas IPA, Lagunitas Brewing
• Spiny Norman, Right Brain Brewery

4.5 Stars

• Grumpy Monk IPA, Sam Adams
• Huma Lupa Licious, Short’s Brewing
• Fluffer IPA, Kuhnhenn

4 Stars

• Crown Jewels, Dragonmead
• Apricot Ale, Pyramid

3.5 Stars

• Gubna Imperial IPA, Oskar Blues

Tashmoo Biergarten, Detroit, MI

Tashmoo biergarten is a local Detroit entity.  They’ve been around a couple of years and have a unique offering to Detroit area beer lovers.  They do an outdoor beer garden exclusively in the fall.  It’s always outdoors, and they limit themselves to the fall time of year.  As they’re getting more popular word of mouth, I frequently hear people talking about or asking if/when they’re going to expand their season.  Last year, I heard they were contemplating starting in summer, but that didn’t happen this summer.  Although I suppose mid-summer is probably technically summer rather than fall.  Anyway, the other unique aspect is they don’t have a permanent location.  Most of their events have been held on empty lots in East English Village neighborhood of Detroit.  They bring in picnic tables, board games, some bean bag games, a bar (of course), and then some local food vendors.  They stress being local in all aspects- the location, the beer offerings (all Michigan brewers), food (local restaurants or food trucks), and people.

They draw in the crowds by way of “virtual word of mouth”.  Of course, way of mouth these days includes actual word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, news articles, blogs.  So I knew I wanted to go to one of these events, but due to their varied location and non-standard schedule, I had to just wait and hope I’d catch word of the next event.  Twitter came in handy.  They announced their date a couple weeks in advance, then the location about a week or in advance.  This one was going to be on Belle Isle, which was a new location for the Tashmoo event (I think).  It was on the lawn of a historic house there, aptly called The White House.  Guess what color it was?

I hadn’t been out on Belle Isle for several years.  It was a nice Saturday afternoon, with a mix of clouds & sun overhead, and a nice warm fall temperature.  But being post-summer it seemed, the island was largely empty.  Great big wide roads, huge grassy expanses for picnicking or playing football, BBQ’ing, etc.  There were pockets of people here and there, but by and large it seemed under-utilized.  Things were clean and grass was well-maintained, but people just simply weren’t there.  Of course, I was just concerned about who was at the White House, so I just drove by and observed the emptiness.  The event was from 12 – 6 pm, and we got there around 2:00.  You buy tickets at a table up front which you use for drinks.  We bought drink tickets and got in the large line.

We had plenty of time to check the place out because the line was extremely slow.  They had the tables set out and people were playing chess, checkers, Candyland, dominos, etc.  There was a cooking station where People Pierogi’s was serving up 3 different stuffed pierogis.  The small bar was set up with the kegs hooked up to Igloo cooler boxes serving the beers on tap.  They had 3 or 4 on tap at a time, and had 6 or 8 varieties they planned to rotate through the day.  It was nice to hang out in the yard, with the historic 2-story White House as a backdrop.  Being fall, the bees don’t know what to do with themselves, so they were around looking to scope out the trash cans, and any beer.  The coasters on the tables served as top-hats to keep the bees out, rather than as preventers of water-rings on the tables.

Now back to the line.  It started out fine, standing and talking, and enjoying the nice fall day.  We mosied along a bit chatting and taking in the scene.  After a while, it started to dawn on us how slowly we were actually covering ground.  I tried to push the impatience out of my mind, but it was coming on strong.  Soon, the people around us started to talk about how long they’d been waiting, how long someone else had been waiting, how long the line was, etc.  Several minutes and a few inches farther along, the discussions changed- somewhat.  Instead of the people in front of us talking about how slow the line was moving, we had people coming up to their friends and saying how they needed another beer, but no one wanted to stand in line again for 30 minutes, so they were heading somewhere else in town to drink beer.  By the time we made it to the bar, I ordered my full allotment of 3 beers I had planned to spread throughout the afternoon and we carried them to the table.  We’d spent 30-35 minutes, and the line wasn’t getting any shorter.  It was actually getting longer.  Although people were leaving that had their first round there because they couldn’t take the line for a second time, there was also a steady stream of new people coming in, so the line never shrank.  It just kept filling up with new people.

Our sit at the picnic tables was nice.  The beer was good and fresh tasting, and it was fun trying to figure out dominos.  This game is much more complicated than it would appear.  I thought it was just something where you laid them out on the table and matched up numbers.  We tried that and it was really lame and really short.  So I decided to look at the rules.  There were about 6 different sets of game rules, all of them involving several paragraphs of rules.  I decided that was ridiculous, and the dominos just needed to go back in the box.  It was a decent distraction for 3 beers.  We were done, we’d eaten pierogis (delicious), and were not interested in standing in the even longer line now.  Luckily, I’d heard that Detroit Beer Company was having an anniversary party and all beers were $2.  So we were off…

Original Gravity Brewery Visit, Milan, MI

I’d had Original Gravity beers at past Michigan Beer Festivals and hadn’t been impressed.  But the convenience of a brewery far enough out of town to feel like a roadtrip, but close enough to not require serious planning or an overnight stay, was too hard to pass up.  So when I decided I’d make a Sunday afternoon trip to the Milan dragway with my 2 young boys (ages 3 & 7), I of course sweetened the plan by Google-ing the location of Original Gravity Brewing.  The building is nothing quaint or interesting from the outside, and it’s not in an interesting old downtown or anything.  It’s just a small plain building with a small parking lot, near the railroad tracks in Milan.  But from the outside I did spy a sizable beer garden area behind a high wall with colorful outdoor table umbrellas peeking up over the top.  This looked interesting.

Walking inside, we were greeted by the sweet, delicious, grainy smell
of beer brewing in process.  To me, it was awesome, and I quickly forgot the non-descript building exterior.  My 7 yr-old didn’t have the same reaction, and the pinching of the noise and loud complaining almost matched the reaction he had at the State Fair the weekend before.  Ignoring him in the same way I mastered at the State Fair, we walked in and checked out the place.  The inside was much more appealing.  Nothing too exciting, but a lot of dark wood with an inviting small-town comfortable feel.  A long bar in the middle of the room, and tables laid out throughout much of the place ranging from small 4-seaters to much longer tables for big groups.  And of course taking up a very large portion of the floor space was the brewing equipment just behind the bar.  Not in a sealed-off area with big windows or anything for you to peer through and feel you’re peeking in on a brewery in process.  But rather like you’re sitting in the brewery yourself, part of the process.  The fresh boiling grain aroma attesting to that if there was any doubt.  So overall you end up with a very inviting feel of sitting in a brewery like you’re working there, but at the same time in a relaxing small town tavern just idling the day away.

The kids gravitated to the 2 video games in the corner.  Next to it was a small bookcase filled with a collection of board games.  The board games served us well to kill time while waiting for our sandwiches.  It kept the kids entertained and from complaining about the brewing aroma, and allowed me to sip my beer in comfort without having to chase them down for running around, or making too much noise, or all the other usual things that stress me out in a restaurant with the kids.  I had the Southpaw IPA and it was very good.  It had a glow about it, combined with a thick, unfiltered haze that made it seem extra fresh and special.

Rounding out my tour of the place, I checked out the outdoor patio.  Beer “garden” is a bit of a misnomer for this place of all concrete on the ground, and high walls surrounding it so you only see the tops of the trees if you look up.  There are a number of picnic tables out here, some with large colorful red patio umbrellas to shelter from the sun or rain, I suppose.  Although not spectacular in any way, it did serve the purpose of an outdoor drinking environment with a relaxed feel similar to the interior of the place.  Before leaving, I looked in on the brewing area.  I saw them brewing in what looked to be a sophisticated homebrew all-grain set-up.  I don’t know if they were doing some special small-batch brew, or if that was typical.  I’m not a brewing expert.  Just an expert consumer…