entirely safe and fun

Every February at the Toronado, San Francisco’s finest beer bar, the excellent folks who run the place take fifty-odd beers off tap and replace them with kegs of barleywine. I recommend strongly that if you find yourself in the vicinity of Haight between Filllmore and Steiner between 17 and 24 February 2007, that you proceed immediately to the Toronado and get your drink the heck on.

For the uninitiated: Barleywine is the strongest traditional style of English ale, typically around 9-12% alcohol by volume, and it poses some serious challenges to its brewers. The long fermentation time invites contamination, and the high final alcohol content brings with it the possiblity of a “stuck” fermentation. The yeast must be kept at a temperature that allows it to keep going, but if it gets too warm it will flood the beer with unpalatable higher organics, and they’ll stay in solution, and the result will be highly suboptimal. The huge amount of sweet malt used to fuel that fermentation tends to leave a syrupy mess of a beer, unless carefully balanced out by a proportionate dose of bitter hops; even competently brewed barleywines can end up treacly or bitteres Biergesicht-inducing. Brewers that successfully navigate these straits wind up with a product so intense in flavor that most American beer-drinkers are not prepared to enjoy it. Since malt and hops are expensive ingredients, and barleywine calls for large amounts of each, barleywine is expensive to brew, and given the possibility of failure and the limited market, only serious artisans generally bother.

Dear serious artisan brewers: Thank you. You rock unreasonably hard.

The Toronado opens at 9AM on the weekend of the Barleywine Festival, and before noon the crowd at the bar is four deep. Attendees make pilgrimmages from all over the West to sample rare barleywines and meet with their fellow beer connoiseurs, marking down notes on the handy spreadsheets provided, deploying six glasses at a time onto heavily marked-up placemats. A productive tasting day might stretch over twelve hours, including a trip or two to the Rosamunde Sausage Grill next door for a sandwich, and include forty tasters spread out among four or six people plus a few retastes – in case you forget, you know.

San Francisco is a great food-and-drink city. Sometimes, it forgets the food part, and that’s OK too.