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By Root 1270 0

down through the floor and into a steel tank of his own for primary fermentation. Later, he racks (transfers, in brewers’ parlance) the ales into a collection of French oak barrels for aging, during which time they accrue interesting acidic angles, tannins, and vanillin from the wine-soaked wood. After a period of time, he blends, then bottles the Belgian-style brews before refermenting them in the bottle according to the méthode champenoise. It’s a simple, immaculately clean operation, one in which he anticipates installing some kind of tasting area. For all those who can’t make the trip to Anchorage, Fletcher’s beers became only the third brewery on American soil to be distributed by the Shelton Brothers, America’s most adventurous importers of specialty, small batch, and farmhouse ales from around the world.

PHILOSOPHY

Flanders on the Klondike. This is innovative, Belgian-style brewing in the heart of wild Alaska—as unexpected as they come.

KEY BEER

Fletcher debuted his Anchorage Brewing Company at the 2011 Great Alaskan Beer & Barley Wine Festival with Anticipation, a superb double IPA (9% ABV), though it was more a test run (not barrel aged in the cellar), and began releasing his main line of six distinct beers in 2011. These included the intriguing Love Buzz Saison, brewed with rose hips, peppercorns, and fresh orange peels, then dry hopped in the pinot noir barrel with Citra hops, and bottled with a cork-and-cage, in the manner of traditional Belgian beers.

DETOUR

MEET ME ON THE

BEER FRONTIER

The Great Northern Brewers Club and Brewers Guild of Alaska Annual Meeting

For a small group of Alaskans, there’s an eagerly anticipated event that takes place each year at the Snow Goose Brewing Company’s early 1960s ballroom. Amid giant tapestries hung from the wood-paneled walls (polar bear, grizzlies, a unicorn), the Great Northern Brewers Club—a statewide organization founded in 1980 that appears to consist partly of fur trappers, Woodstock time-travelers, and Carhartt-clad loggers—calls itself to order, and simultaneously hosts the Brewers Guild of Alaska for its only meeting of the year.

This is a beer thing of course, so it’s not exactly solemn. The hundred or so home-brew club members—some of whom were said to have bush-planed in from the interior—bring potluck dishes of chili (and one labeled simply “moose”) and coolers with beer, and gather around in circles of folding chairs.

I crashed the 2011 meeting, during which Jim “Dr. Fermento” Roberts (head of the state brewers’ guild, a separate entity, and a local beer authority for the Anchorage Press and the California-based Celebrator Beer News) took the little stage in a plaid shirt, khakis, and a pair of spectacles to read Important Announcements, which he unfurled like a scroll to the floor. It was a warm welcome to just about everyone in the room, including two “Beerdrinkers of the Year” (a contest held each year at Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver), representatives of most of the Alaska-based breweries, and the keynote speaker, Sierra Nevada’s Ken Grossman. Dr. Fermento wound it up five minutes later with the admonition “Drink responsibly; throw up strategically—make it count,” which provoked a laugh because Fermento seems about as wild as a ceramics teacher.

The introductions complete, Fermento passed around a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag; this was to collect donations for an injured community member. Next was Ken Grossman’s absorbing I-was-a-home-brewer-too-talk; you could have heard a pin drop. For the rest of the night, Grossman, Alaskan Brewing Company founder and Guild “Lead Berserker” Geoff Larson, Fermento and others mingled as a few Big Lebowski–era John Goodman types in hunting vests and trucker hats discussed delicate brewing experiments gone amok in one breath, and tropical illness and Thailand’s phallic shrines the next.

Things were just warming up when the band took the stage. Clad in a Hawaiian shirt, Tom Dalldorf, publisher of the Celebrator, gamely led his Rolling Boil Blues Band in a rendition of “Home Brew,” to the tune