After the Lupulin Reunuless Do last night I was hating life at work on Friday. I can’t get wasted and show up work the next day like I could 10 years ago. It took awhile to feel normal. Probably about the time I got out of work to head to SAVOR was when things started looking up.
I went all out and got tickets to both nights. Last year I don’t think I had enough time/energy to hit all the breweries in one night. So this year we were able to take our time and not get too crazy the first night. We ran a little late and showed up about 10 minutes before start time. Everyone gets there about 30 minutes early and stands in line. The line was still huge so we walked around back where there was no line and went right in. Teri and I were both hungry and that is a bad thing when you are about to do three or four hours of drinking.
Thankfully SAVOR is all about pairing food with fine beer so we made a point to eat everything in sight for the first 30 minutes. SAVOR has special seminars that you can sign up for and attend a special tasting with a brewer or panel of brewers. There was a west coast/east coast collaboration between breweries. There was one that paired local beers with local foods. There was a barrel beer session where you could taste different vintages of the same barrel aged beer. There was a beer and dessert session. All of these sessions sell out before the public tickets go on sale. Being a previous attendee I was able to get tickets to the session of my choice. For this fourth year SAVOR decided to ask two attending breweries to do a special collaboration for the event. They happened to ask the two biggest breweries Sam Adams and Dogfish Head.
Teri and I went to the session with Sam Adams owner Jim Koch and Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talking about their collaboration called SAVOR Flowers. It was only the second collaboration for Sam Adams. The first being the Infinium which I still have a bottle of in my fridge (it’s getting old). That was quite an extraordinary collaboration. For SAVOR Flowers they messed with the one ingredient that hasn’t been messed with yet: the water. They somehow created a 1000 gallons of rose water using a distiller I believe at Dogfish Head. Then they had to ship the water, keeping it sterile, all the way to Boston to Sam Adams. As Sam of Dogfish Head says, they have some really cool tools at Sam Adams to do some really cool stuff. Sam Adams made a triple bock back in the early 90’s that was the highest alcohol beer in the world. They broke the max alcohol barrier that had existed for all of beer’s history. Since then breweries around the world have competed on brewing the highest alcohol beer. Anyway, apparently Sam Adams still uses the first barrel used to age that first batch and Jim decided to use that barrel to age SAVOR Flowers. Apparently they use barrel #1 to brew their Utopia. So along with the rose water they brewed this beer with lavender, hibiscus, and jasmine. They also used heather honey from Scotland and some lemon syrup. Finally they added Hop 369 which is a new hop never before used in a commercial beer (35 lbs to be exact). It smelled like geraniums (I think). And as you can expect the beer tasted just like flowers. I think its one of those that depends on the setting and your current palette. Later when I had it I thought it was a bit much. Looking forward to trying it again.
After the session was over we had two more hours mingling with brewers and tasting fine rare beers from all over the country. It was great to actually talk to the people who brewed the beer rather than volunteers who don’t know anything about beer. The food started getting sparse at the end of the night but most beers were still pouring. At the end of the night everyone was given their gift bottle of SAVOR Flowers. Pretty cool they gave everyone a special beer that will never be brewed again.
Tomorrow we do it again with Beth and Matt.
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