Kyle Nabilcy
Bourbon Barrel Barleywine and tap list
It was a little after 7 a.m., pretty early for a Saturday (early for doing anything other than getting to the Farmers’ Market to dodge the crowd, anyway), when five of us piled into the car to drive from Madison to Amherst, Wisconsin, home of Central Waters Brewing. The autumn air was brisk, with the threat of a drizzly day looming. One of our number had gotten lucky and earned a full allocation of Black Gold, one of Central Waters’ more prized bourbon barrel releases; the rest of us had missed out.
The River Run is the unlucky beer lover’s backup plan. Central Waters organizes this charity race every year, and puts it on the calendar during its Great Amherst Beer Festival, which also typically serves as the release party for Black Gold in the years Central Waters packages it. Registered participants in the River Run earn the opportunity to purchase one bottle of Black Gold — less than the four offered to each full-allocation ticket holder, but better than nothing.
River Runners also get a River Run exclusive beer included in their registration fee; this year’s was a cherry porter brewed with rye malt, in collaboration with Sanford Restaurant in Milwaukee. This “free” beer helps to counteract the sting of paying $30 for the race just to pay another $20 for the bottle of Black Gold, but that’s still not too outlandish a price for a world-class stout like Black Gold. There’s really no reliable third option for acquiring it, so the premium price is what you pay.
Kyle Nabilcy
Registration tables with barrels
There’s a timed 5 mile race — yeah, no chance — and an untimed 2 mile run/walk. That was much more our speed, so those of us who didn’t get the allocation ticket decided to register. The problem, though, is that Central Waters recognizes that a lot of 2 mile registrants are really only doing it for the single bottle allocation of Black Gold, and aren’t particularly interested in the run/walk. As such, the pre-race day email is a bit confusingly worded, indicating that registration packets will be available to pick up until 1 p.m. on race day, which happens to be right when the regular allocation release begins.
Central Waters, it would seem, doesn’t want to devalue its charity run (and rightly so) by telling all the beerdos they don’t need to show up to participate in the race they registered for, but also doesn’t want to force unwilling participants to grumble their way through the course. Basically, if you’re only registering for the race to get your bottle of Black Gold, you don’t even really need to show up for the starting gun, so long as you make it before the scrum begins for the people who got full allocations.
We were intending to do the run/walk when we left from Madison, I swear.
But it was about a quarter after 8 a.m., while we were rolling up the Interstate, all of us waiting for the coffee to perk us up, that one of the crew re-read the email and caught that buried gem about late arrival. Some imprecations were muttered, and we decided that breakfast sounded better than a potentially rainy two kilometers in rural central Wisconsin.
To his credit, one member of the squad was fully ready to run the 2 mile but we pulled him down to our sedentary level. The hearty breakfast and explosion of Halloween decorations at the nearby Frontier Restaurant in Amherst compensated for the lazy peer pressure, and made us feel a little less “sorry!” and a little more “sorry not sorry!” about arriving at the brewery, getting our beers, and getting right back into the car to go eat bacon and pancakes. And drink more coffee, at Ruby Roasters. We’re high maintenance.
Kyle Nabilcy
The view of the event, from the Black Gold line by the stage, with the Black Gold tap booth waaaaay at the other end.
By the time we got back to the brewery a little before noon, when the runners were done and the beer festival was about to begin, we were ready to actually participate in a big crowd of people all pointing the same direction. In this case, though, it was not toward a finish line but rather the line toward the Black Gold tap, which looped about ⅚ of the way around the large festival tent adjacent to the barrel warehouse.
We cashed in our race “runner” free pour tickets to have something to drink in line — hello, Bourbon Barrel Barleywine — and tapped our toes to the band on the music stage. But eventually, we got to the point of it all, the Black Gold.
This year’s Black Gold, I will tell you, is worth everything we did and didn’t do to get it. The barrel is all up in your face, lending to the roasty depths a vanilla richness that evokes French toast. It has a pleasant body, something between the regular Bourbon Barrel Stout and Central Waters’ anniversary stouts. The cappuccino-colored head tells you right from the outset that it’s going to be a rewarding sip, and it absolutely is.
I would definitely drive almost two hours in a crowded car to drink coffee, eat breakfast, hang around a little, and then wait in a long line for Black Gold again, but I really probably would walk two kilometers, too. Maybe.
Editor's note: This story has been edited to reflect that the length of the races in question are in miles, not kilometers, as originally written.
