The Brewing Projekt
I’ve had the fortune (and sometimes duty) to experience Isthmus Beer and Cheese Fest in a lot of different ways over the years. This last Saturday was the event’s eighth go-around, and over those eight years, festival attendees might have spied me wearing a number of different figurative hats.
You might’ve seen me working the front gate, scanning tickets and handing out tote bags and glassware. I’ve worked behind the tap handles, pouring beer after beer after beer for the thirsty masses. I’ve experienced both the press of general admission kickoff and the chummy, spread-out VIP session. And I’ve even gone upstairs, where no level of ticket can take you, to photograph the whole bustling event space.
Beer and Cheese Fest is not like other beer-centric festivals in Wisconsin, which is not to say that it’s doing anything remarkable or odd. It’s just that it has its own identity, distinct from all the other beer events around the state. The years have seen the number of cheese vendors decrease, but there should be no question that the crowd wants its curds. Just wait until 3 p.m. or so, when the lines for the cheesemaker tables are longer than just about any brewery.
The little cups of pretzels and Merkts cheese spread, made with two different Capital Brewery beers, were both handy and tasty. The cheese buffet line at the Beer and Cheese School corner was bountiful, big crumbling boulders of a variety of cheeses. I know cheesemakers want to make some money while they’re at the Fest, and maybe the beer fans aren’t as loose with their wallets when all the beers are already paid for, but I have to think the brand visibility is worth something. I missed Creme de la Coulee, a favorite of years past.
It’s a beer festival, though, and the crowd seemed to have found a favorite almost immediately. I never witnessed fewer than a couple dozen people in line at the Brewing Projekt, an up-and-comer from Eau Claire. If you’ve never heard of this brewery, that’s understandable; there’s almost no distribution of its beers to Madison. The exception: 16-ounce cans of Eaux Henry! Eaux Sally!, its collaboration with Danish superstar gypsy brewer Mikkeller. Eaux Henry was made specifically for Justin Vernon’s 2016 Eaux Claires music festival and arrived in Madison late in 2016, putting the Brewing Projekt firmly on the beer hipster’s radar for Beer and Cheese Fest.
Yes, I went through the line a couple times.
Gunpowder is an India pale ale with green tea, and it could be seen as the brewery’s flagship beer. I didn’t get around to the regular tap version, but the casked version with additional Earl Grey tea available in the new cask ale side room was aromatic, juicy and delicious. My love for coffee stouts is well-established, and Midnight Oil deploys cold brew from Menomonie’s Raw Deal cafe and coffee roaster, to great effect.
The real jaw-droppers, though were the two versions of the Brewing Projekt’s American wild ale, SoWAH. Made with cherries, blueberries and raspberries, and pitched with yeast strains scavenged from the Brewing Projekt’s favorite Belgian ales, SoWAH is sharply tart and a pretty shade of pink. It reaps the benefit of a secondary fermentation in used wine barrels, and demonstrates a nice middle ground between high-effort/high-risk fully spontaneous fermentation and low-risk/less-flavor kettle souring. In addition to the regular SoWAH, a casked version aged on additional tart Door County cherries was even more fruit-forward, a beauty.
The Brewing Projekt wasn’t my sole source of joy, of course. Though I couldn’t imagine drinking a whole pint, Surly’s Mole Smoke was a spicy, rich variant on the brewery’s regular rauchbier. Veneration, a barrel-aged quadrupel from 3 Sheeps, had a major banana bread thing going on, with a silky mouthfeel.
The meads from Crafted Artisan Meadery just outside of Akron, Ohio, are impossibly fun. This was my first encounter with You Down with CCP?, which laid flavors of coconut cream pie over a light mead base. And from Cedarburg’s Fermentorium, an experimental batch of shiitake mushroom-laced porter delivered all the nutty, forest-floor mushroom flavors you’d expect with a fine porter at the heart of it.
That would have been an excellent beer to pair with cheese, in fact, and I wish I’d thought of it then. A nice gouda, or maybe something harder-bodied and alpine. Though with those cheese lines, the only ones who can just grab a cube whenever they want are the ones on the other side of the table. Working a cheese booth is maybe the only Beer and Cheese Fest job I haven’t done yet.
