Great Arizona Beer Festival 2003

Great Arizona Beer Festival 2003 By BDDC Staff Writing about beer can be a hard job, but when you have scantily clad women chasing you around all over the place for a photo opportunity, it makes it even harder. Hey, it's a rough job, but someone has to do it! Pictured from left to right are Celebrator Nevada correspondent Bob Barnes, BB, and Celebrator Arizona & New Mexico/Beerdude.com correspondent Pete Ricks. The 2003 Great Arizona Beer Festival was held March 29-30 at the Arizona Center in downtown Phoenix and festival patrons were treated to great weather, and great craft beer. Arizona breweries were well represented and there were quite a few from California and other neighboring states in attendance too. Arizona craft beer distributor Little Guy Distributing brought in some great selections for the event, serving some fine Tabernash beer from Colorado and a couple of brews from Bear Republic in California. O'Brien's and Oggi's from California were pouring some full-bodied, hoppy Tom Nickel ales. The IPA was very nice and the Barleywine was loaded with malt and hops. Also in from California was BierBitzch, which not only has some great Pilsner Beer, but some interesting t-shirts too. Of course, Stone Brewing was serving Arrogant Bastard and IPA. Great Weather, Great Crowd It was a little breezy on Saturday, but it eventually warmed up to a balmy 75 degrees later on in the afternoon. Festival patrons were entertained by two bands each day and there was plenty of great food to be sampled. Every brewpub and brewery in Phoenix was serving up local favorites, and there are many. Sonora brewer Uwe Boer reports that the Festivus strong ale is so popular now, it will be a year round offering. I had tasted the Festivus when it first came out about a year ago and it seemed to have a little more Hallertau profile than I prefer, but the batch that Uwe was serving at GABF2003 was outstanding. This is one great, malty beer and I can see why this beer is such a big hit now! Four Peaks was serving local favorites like Kilt Lifter and 8th Street Ale. Southern Arizona was well represented as usual with Nimbus, Thunder Canyon, Gentle Ben's, and Electric Dave all serving a variety of fine beers. Another vendor from the Tucson area that was serving some very interesting beers was Silesia Brands, Inc.. Silesia had a wonderful selection of about a dozen Eastern European beers and they were outstanding. If you like an authentic Czech Pilsner or Polish Porter, check out www.beerwinevodka.com for availability and locations of these fine beers throughout Arizona. As for the Southern Arizona breweries, Gentle Ben's was serving some very timely NCAAAle. Although the Arizona Wildcats went down in defeat on the first day of the festival, the NCAAAle was still foaming along quite nicely. Thunder Canyon was serving up some nice Stout and other beers. Nimbus had some very tasty beers on tap also. Jim Counts, managing partner for Nimbus, reports that Nimbus has recently expanded capacity in a big way with a new brewing system and 150 bbl tanks. Now that is quite a bit of craft beer capacity! There were so many great beers worth mentioning that it would be difficult to cover them all in one article. A large beer festival like GABF 2003 really needs to be experienced in person. If you missed it, there's always next year!