The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [28]
PHILOSOPHY
Big, brawny, frontier beer, no apologies. There’s even a “no cell phones” sign in the taproom. These beers deserve your undivided attention.
KEY BEER
Wheeler’s beers are excellent, especially DMMDI IPA (Devil Made Me Do It IPA; 6.66% ABV), Black Fang Stout (9% ABV), and Captain Cook’s Spruce Tip Ale, an homage to Cook’s method of brewing without hops—as well as to Wheeler’s former job as a forester.
Anchorage
Life in Alaska has never been easy, but beer helps, especially if you don’t have to import it. Stoked by home brewers who could make beer affordable by brewing it at home rather than paying for cost-prohibitive beer shipments, the craft beer scene in Alaska is hitting a rolling boil. While Alaska’s capital, Juneau, has the state’s oldest bar and first craft brewery, Anchorage is pulling its weight in the beer department with a slew of high-quality brewpubs, beer bars, and the annual Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival, held in the icy depths of mid-January. But isn’t it cold at that time of year? Yes. It’s bleakly, face-numbingly, eye-frostingly cold, though locals walk around in windbreakers and wonder aloud how warm it seems. But it gets dark so early. (Yes; all the more reason to make hay while the sun shines and then go drink delicious beer.)
Fact is, the winter weather in Anchorage doesn’t stop locals from gathering, much less going mountain biking (with snow tires!) along the water with views of Mount McKinley (elevation: 20,320 feet) or even across a frozen lake, with the soaring Chugach peaks behind town. Nor does the drop in the mercury stop brewers from showing up with their best stuff—high-strength, cellar-worthy barley wines are popular up here—especially during the festival. A midwinter visit to Anchorage is all about the camaraderie of the state’s growing brewing scene: for the annual Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival, some fifty breweries band together, including twenty-plus operating in Alaska—and about two thousand locals a night don their finest going-out-on-the-town clothes, making it fun and unexpected—kind of like mountain biking in January.
ITINERARIES
1 – DAY
Glacier Brewhouse, Snow Goose Restaurant & Sleeping Lady Brewing Co., Anchorage Brewing Co., Humpy’s
3 – DAY
One-day itinerary plus Café Amsterdam, Midnight Sun Brewing Co.
7 – DAY
Three-day itinerary plus Haines Brewing Co.
WINTER WARMER
The Great Alaskan Beer & Barley Wine Festival, started in 2005, is held every January, traditionally in downtown Anchorage’s Egan Convention Center. Brewers compete for medals and bragging rights in the Barley Wine category and mingle with about two thousand fans a night. Do as the locals do and hang out in the Alaska end, where just about every single commercial brewery in Alaska has a booth with fresh beer. There’s a Connoisseur Session on the final afternoon, for which the brewers present beers they used to hide under the tables. Highly recommended for tried-and-true craft beer lovers. For info: auroraproductions.net/beer-barley.html
ANCHORAGE BREWING CO.
717 W. 3rd Ave. • Anchorage, AK 99501 • (907) 360-5104 anchoragebrewingcompany.com • Established: 2011
SCENE & STORY
With a projected annual output of just 360 barrels a year, Alaska’s newest brewing project is the vision of Gabe Fletcher, formerly the soft-spoken head brewer at Anchorage’s Midnight Sun who is credited with improving the brewery’s fortunes early on. It’s also the most unusual brewing operation to come along in Alaska since that day in 1986 when Geoff and Marcy Larson dared to open Alaskan Brewing Company, now one of the biggest breweries in the country in a state formerly without craft beer.
Fletcher works in tandem with another Anchorage brewer, Sleeping Lady Brewing Company, by brewing his own batches there and then gravity-flowing the wort (unfermented beer) straight