SAVOR 2012 Wrap Up

Next year SAVOR heads to New York City, and in turn, DC gets the Craft Brewers Conference. It remains to be seen if this will be a fair trade, as SAVOR and the week before it have become something of, in the words of the head of the Brewers Association of Maryland's J.T. Smith, "not just a craft beer prom, but a craft beer South By Southwest." 

I wrote about SAVOR last year here, and this year my thoughts are over at DCBeer.com. Some impressions:

There are some breweries who really get what SAVOR is all about. Bells, Foothills, and Stone all had their regular offerings kick, only to put on rarer, more esoteric, and aged beers. When Bells ran out of The Wild One, an oud bruin style, perhaps the tartest, driest beer at SAVOR, they put on their Expedition and Double Cream stouts, and their 2008 Eccentric Ale. I walked over to Foothills to see if they had any People’s Porter left and just stared, dumbfounded, at a Sexual Chocolate tap handle for a good minute before stammering if that was what they were pouring. A sixtel of that [imperial stout] at ChurchKey didn’t last until sundown in June of 2010. I had three pours of it and walked around the building grinning like an idiot. When Stone’s unnamed IPA kicked, they brought out the Vertical Epics from 2007 to 2011. All three of these breweries went the extra mile.
 The sours this year were uniformly and singularly, for a style as a whole, excellent. It’s a very good sign for American craft beer that brewers and breweries from all over the country are not only making sour beers, but mastering them.
The food at SAVOR was significantly better this year, and most of the pairings I experienced were better matched and more intuitive than last year. Allagash Interlude with the Asian pear in phyllo, many sours with the roasted beet and chevre tartlet, and anything with the huckleberry and meyer lemon cream puff, in particular, were great.

 DCBeer profiles each brewery that attends SAVOR. My contributions are below.

A trendspotting piece on the IPAs of SAVOR.

Allagash Brewing.
Ballast Point Brewing.
Founders Brewing.
Full Sail Brewing.
Green Flash Brewing.
Ithaca Beer Company.
Magnolia Pub and Brewery.
Schlafly Beer.
Standing Stone Brewing.
Surly Brewing.
Two Brothers Brewing.

Cheers.