Where the tough get going

The Beer Travelers recently returned from a visit to Beer Camp IX, which takes place twice a year at the Oldenberg Brewery and Drawbridge Estates in Fort Mitchell, Ky., outside Cincinnati. You've probably read about Beer Camp in a newspaper or magazine, so we'll try not to repeat much of what you already know.

Beer Camp is a weekend of learning about beer -- how beer is made, the history of beer, beer styles, beer ingredients, beer and food, and great places to drink beer, which is where we come in. We first attended Beer Camp three years ago, as campers/journalists, and we've gone to the last two as speakers/beer guides. We're not paid to participate; we do it for fun and to promote our book and newsletter. Other speakers are brewers, writers and historians.

Beer Camp is a hoot, and it's a great way to make friends with people who like to drink beer, who are of course, the best people in the world. The camp is organized like a summer camp, with counselors, camp directors, a Beer Camp oath, Beer Camp songs, and fun and games. Campers are put in groups, called "cabins" and named after beer styles.

Beer Camp has become not only an event for family members -- fathers and sons, husbands and wives -- to attend together, but a way for friends who are scattered around the country to regroup. For example, Mark Melkonian, Tom "Bones" Kalahar and Walter Hershey, who attended Beer Camp IX, all grew up in the Detroit area, but two of them now live elsewhere. They hadn't been together for five years before they met up at Beer Camp.

There are more than 300 beers to choose from. Every camp, somebody will set out to try them all.

Many of the campers are repeat participants. This was Harry Hudgins' seventh Beer Camp, and he even had a bowling shirt custom-made for the occasion. Greg Kamarow and his father, Tony, attended Beer Camp VIII together and met up again for No. IX.

A highlight of the weekend is the Beer Brewfet, which has more than 300 different beers (351 at the most recent camp) from around the world. Campers receive tasting glasses and are encouraged to try as many as they wish. Beer guides offer suggestions and explain why different beers taste the way they do. Usually someone attempts to try them all, but no one's come close yet -- the limit seems to be around 150.

The weekend costs about $350 (plus transportation), which includes two nights' lodging in the three-diamond Drawbridge Estates, five meals, a camp T-shirt and plenty of beer.

Oldenberg brewmaster Ken Schierberg says he has never met anyone who had a bad time at Beer Camp. But there are always a few complaints. Some campers would prefer to drink entire bottles of beer, rather than small, tasting-glass portions, and that's possible on only a few occasions during the weekend. Some campers find the speakers boring. Some don't think they get enough food, although the food's quality is frequently praised. Some don't like the songs. And no one will lament the passing of Beer Camp Jeopardy, a game show on beer trivia. As camp director Dave Heidrich said, "If I come up with an idea like Beer Camp Jeopardy again, shoot me."

Here are our legible notes from the March 22-24 Beer Camp:

3:45 p.m. Friday. Some campers are so happy to be there and meet a beer guide that they get down on their knees and salaam her. She gives them a tour of the brewery, and they recall the episode of "Cheers" in which Norm gets to work in a brewery and hugs the kettles. "This is heaven," one of them says, after Schierberg pours them beer fresh from a tank.

7:30 p.m. Friday. Swami Jack Kenny, composer of the Beer Camp songbook, sings a few of the tunes that didn't make it. They include "Do You Want to Go to Beer Camp" (to the tune of "Do You Want to Know a Secret") and "I Can't Stop Drinking You" (to "I Can't Stop Loving You").

9:15 p.m. Friday. The Beer Brewfet opens a few minutes late. Some campers head off to sample on their own. Other remain with their cabins while guides and counselors retrieve beers for the group to sample and discuss. Earlier, All About Beer magazine publisher Daniel Bradford had conducted the "world's fastest" beer tasting, so campers have and idea of what they want to taste.

Some want to compare pale ales, others are anxious to find out about "coffee stouts." None of the 15 or so Lagers gathered around two tables hesitates to try anything -- and by the end of Friday, they will have sampled more than 75 beers, most of them an ounce or two at a time. Not everybody likes everything. So they take one of the small buckets that was used to deliver beer to each table for the "fastest tasting" and make a slop bucket.

10:30 p.m. Friday. "Can we try a Brooklyn Brown next?" a camper asks. "My taste buds are going nuts."

11 p.m. Friday. Two groups -- the Weiss Squad and the Bocks -- develop into the major contenders for the King Gambrinus Award, a "spirit" award usually given to the group that proves the most obnoxious. A member of the Stouts, Howard Folz of Dayton, Ohio, grows tired of the Bocks' behavior. He steals their table signs, borrows some Liquid Paper from the front desk, and changes the word "bock" to a common obscenity. (The Bocks paste over the sign, those wimps.)

11:45 p.m. Friday. The Lagers have systematically worked their way through the lambics. They've sampled two different gueuzes, and some have even asked for second on the Rodenbach Red. They decide to petition the next day to have their cabin name changed to Lambic.

Midnight Friday. During the course of the evening some campers have begun to scrounge bottles. Some are bottle and label collectors, others are homebrewers who simply want empty bottles. Those paying careful attention may notice not all the bottles are empty.

12:15 a.m. Friday. The Lagers' slop bucket is full of parts of more than 50 different beers. So one of them dumps in the malt ("This is good? Will there be any for breakfast?" one asks) and hops that are on each table. Are they drunk? Well, nobody suggests sampling this brew. Their guide holds out hope he'll see them at breakfast in the morning.

Wee hours, Saturday morning. Two campers decide to catch a few zzz's in a tent set up in a hotel lobby (to add to the camp atmosphere). They awake at 5 a.m., go to their rooms and sleep until 11 a.m., missing the first three hours of Saturday's activities. Their nocturnal hijinks are discovered when their beer guide finds them crawling around in the tent, looking for a lighter.

8:30 a.m. Saturday. Bill Clinton is coming to Cincinnati today but has turned down an offer to visit Beer Camp. Lookalike Beer Camper Glen Hunter of Birmingham, Ala., stands in for him.

11 a.m. Saturday. Jeff Mendel of Tabernash Brewing Co. in Denver talks about the challenge of establishing a German-style craft brewery in a state where ales have become synonymous with the beer renaissance. "The perception is that all microbrews are ales, and lagers are something (beer drinkers) are walking away from," Mendel says. "Lagers are perceived as weak ... some people would use the work insipid."

The Lagers whoop it up and begin to toast each other. The decide to withdraw their petition for a name change, and that night change their table signs to read, "Insipids."

9:15 p.m. Saturday. The first camp Cigar Smoke proves quite popular with many campers. "Do I look cultured?" asks Charlie Wheat of Terre Haute, Ind., striking a pose.

9:30 p.m. Saturday. A camper announces, "I've had enough beer." (!!!)

10:30 p.m. Saturday. Beer marshal Gregg Gausepohl passes around bottles of Dixie White Chocolate Moose beer, which tastes like a white chocolate egg cream. Campers mix the beer with raspberry lambic and porter for a new taste treat. "I want to take a bottle of this home to seduce my wife," says homebrewer Dan Listerman.

11 p.m. Saturday. The tough get going. Some are still sampling beers new to them -- Obsidian Stout? How did we miss this one so long? -- and some collectors are still hard at work. By now, campers have been hanging out in the same giant bar for about 30 hours, and there are two basic topics of discussion: beer, and everything else in life. The few remaining Lagers follow a discussion about marbles with a discourse on barbecue.

11:50 p.m. Saturday. A camper of large girth and a beer deputy of larger girth make a beer belly sandwich with a smaller guy.

12:25 a.m. Sunday. Campers try desperately to consume as many beers as possible, because the Brewfest closes in five minutes.

12:30 a.m. The lights go out. The few remaining campers grab bottles and hit the hallway.

Wee hours, Sunday morning. A Beer Camper is seen staggering out of Coyotes, the complex's country-and-western dance hall, at closing time. A friend helps to carry him, and together they weave toward their rooms. With his last ounce of strength, one of them cries, "Stouts!"

9:15 a.m. Sunday. Heidrich hands out Beer Nuts for breakfast. "Now that all the (tuition) checks have cleared, we can serve you what we really want to," he says. Fortunately, the buffet line opens only minutes later.

9:45 a.m. Sunday. Clinton lookalike Glen Hunter is asked "Where's Hillary?" "I'm never going a place where he's appearing again," he says.

12:30 p.m. Sunday. Campers packing up their belongings for the trip home run into members of a local Methodist church, who had held a service at the hotel. They discover they're back in the real world.

This story was written in March of 1996.