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Amana Beer Festival
by Brendan Mackie
On any given Saturday night during the school year, Grinnellians will dutifully gather in a dorm hallway around a keg of cheap beer—Natty Ice let’s say—and drink a lot, talking too loudly about topics they don’t understand. This is assumed behavior. It is everyday. What else is there to do in the middle of Iowa?
On the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 3, in search of something more, I traveled down a rural road and discovered a wealth of Iowan microbreweries. I met people who had spent their lives proving that not everything that comes out of a keg tastes like fizzy cold urine. In the process I saw a religious commune, ate brats and realized that there is more to our state than corn and soy beans; and more to drinking beer than just Natty Ice and Harris parties.
Highway Six to Amana
East down Sixth Avenue, past the Chrystal Center and Bucksbaum, down from Burling, after you’ve left even the backside of Quad behind and waved good-bye to Dari Barn, something happens to the city of Grinnell: it gives way to Iowa. Our Sixth Avenue soon becomes Iowa’s Highway Six. It happens so quickly you can miss it during a five-second nap, then wake up suddenly confronted with a limited palate of green and yellow fields, blue sky and the occasional small peeling-paint town where you might have expected the $lum.
After a little less than an hour on Highway Six you will reach the Amana Colonies, a cluster of seven villages you would not be blamed for calling picturesque. The deliberate quaintness of the bed and breakfasts, the taverns and the billboards proudly proclaiming Willkommen! to all drivers-through seems a little self-conscious after the impersonal rollby of the rest of Iowa. But it is also undeniably friendly.
The Amana Colonies were settled as a religious commune in Amana in 1855; the seven villages were run communally until 1932. This makes Amana one of the longest-lasting communes ever. These days the colonies are a tourist attraction, with plenty of restaurants, shops and “sights” for tourists to see. And, yes, the town is also home to Amana refrigerators. Despite this, the colonies still retain a sort of special charm which, undoubtedly, assures their survival. It takes only the smallest suspension of disbelief to think that small villages like these still cover the state, or that they ever did.
The rolling streets of the city of Amana were, on Saturday, gently busy with people. As soon as we had parked the car, my photographer noticed a vendor selling kettle corn and wanted some, but, rather than dawdling looking at the historic landmarks, I anxiously pressed forward. We had important work to do.
The Festival
In the beer refrigerator at McNally’s, tucked between the Sierra Nevada, Flying Dog and Heineken, you will find a couple of six-packs by Millstream Brewery, a microbrewery based in the town of Amana.
This particular Saturday was not just a hot day, but Millstream’s 20th anniversary. As a celebration, Millstream was hosting the first annual festival of Iowa beers, and eight of the fourteen Iowa breweries had turned out to show off their stuff, alongside two home-brew associations. Every beer at the festival made Miller High Life look less like the champagne of beers, and more like the inbred, drawling cousin of beer that the other beers stay away from at the beer-family reunions.
“One thing we need to do is educate Iowans on Iowa breweries and the craft beers that are available here,” said Teresa Sly Albert, one of the owners of Millstream. “We got some good stuff here in our own backyard that people don’t even know about.”
The festival was held in a vacant lot across the street from the Millstream Brewery under a tarp not much bigger than a school bus. In the shade next to the tarp a knot of people lounged in chairs, drinking beers of course, hiding from the harsh afternoon sun and scarfing down big brats with sauerkraut. Under the tarp, people milled from brewer to brewer, filling their glasses with the best Iowa has to offer, chatting jovially with the brewers and whoever else happened to stumble in their way. Across the street in Millstream’s Biergarten, a band played a decent cover of American Pie. “It’s a tough job and somebody’s gotta do it,” Teresa said about brewing. “It might as well be us.”
As I made the rounds of the different brewers, I didn’t just taste the beer, but chatted with the brewers themselves. They filled my three ounce commemorative glass while telling me about hops, ales, lager, “peated” malt, whatever else I happened to ask about and much that I didn’t.
The brewers, every one of them men, had a detailed knowledge of brewing and beer which only comes from a certain sort of masculine obsession and dedication coming close to love.
Where some men are obsessed about cars and beer, others about football and beer, these men have simplified the equation: they are just obsessed about beer. There was a distinct sense of camaraderie, not just between the brewers, but between everyone there; we were in Iowa, and we would not do a double take if somebody started telling us about cask fermentation.
The Beers
Beer is something I would guess most Grinnellians do not think too much about—if they think about it at all. Beer seems to simply happen, like dining hall food and finals week. But beer is carefully brewed, and complex. “Craftsman beers are drank for the enjoyment of the flavors,” said Bill Laddish, the owner of Cargill Malts.
Millstream’s Dopplebock (available in McNally’s for around eight bucks) was a sweet, complex, almost syrupy beer. I drank it slow and savored the many different flavors. In one sip I caught something like the taste of a campfire, another sip produced toffee, and in yet another I could fool myself into thinking I was drinking some sort of chocolaty Guinness. I swished my beer around the bottom of the glass and sniffed it so as to get at its bouquet, just like wine tasters do.
Lost Duck’s pale ale was similarly complex. Pale ale is my stand-by choice: no matter what my mood or taste is, I’ll always be down for a Sierra Nevada. Beneath the immediately recognizable bitter hoppy taste, Lost Duck’s pale ale had hints of herbs, even bubblegum. When I told him, the brewer, Dr. Timothy Benson, looked at me like I had had one too many. He may have been right.
I wandered from stall to stall, testing out whatever beer caught my eye, usually settling on a dark stout, or sometimes another pale ale or maybe a hefeweisen.
As I sampled a beer from one of the home-brewers’ associations, I knew it was the beginning of the end. I swished it around my mouth, gulped it down and started on a second glass before chatting with the brewer about the taste. “This tastes distinctly bitter,” I said.
“No it doesn’t. It tastes sweet,” the brewer said with marked certainty. That marked the end of my beer criticism.
Grinnellians often speak as if the stretch of Iowa between Des Moines and Iowa City were uninhabited. Maybe some long-ago explorer took the map of Iowa and scored out half the state with the dire words: here be monsters, or better yet, there’s nothing here, and no one yet has had the free time to get out and prove this assumption wrong.
Iowa has more interesting things going on in it than a beer festival. When I watch 6th Avenue turn to Highway 6 and allow our college to be placed in this hilly, beautiful and strange state I feel a release. We may be freaking out about our deadlines, but a couple minutes down the track, there’s this.
Or, then again, we may be content with our red plastic cups and our kegs.
At around 5:30 p.m., the gourmands at the beer festival voted on their three favorite beers. Someone in a small forklift took away the spent kegs. The tasting was officially over. Some people migrated to the Biergarten, where the band was still playing, to have more Millstream and chat before night came.
Some festival-goers, however, remained on site, trying to finesse a couple more drinks off the oftentimes obliging brewers. Lost Duck brewing was valiantly still serving to the very end. “When the party ends at two,” Dr. Benson said, “the bar doesn’t close at one.”
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