INhonolulu Magazine Issue #16 - April 2014 | Page 34

From page 33
this tasty beer to hit retail shelves
and O‘ahu beer taps in the coming
months.
We also enjoyed the Black
Perle Imperial Stout by Double
Mountain Brewery, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s Ovila Abbey
Quad (with plums!) and Stone
Brewing Co.’s Stone Sublimely
Self-Righteous Ale. If you ever
get a chance to buy any of these
beers (check Tamura’s!), I highly
recommend doing so.
I think my absolute favorite,
though, was the La Roja style sour
red ale by Jolly Pumpkin Artisan
Ales. Refreshing, pucker-inducing
and packed with amazing flavor
notes, the La Roja was fascinating,
but so delicious that it seemed to
vanish from my commemorative
Kona Brewers Festival glass before
I could really get a full sense of the
beer’s complexities. So, naturally,
I had to go back for further tests.
Results are still inconclusive, however, and so I am now contemplating ordering a case—you know, in
the name of science.
Not all the breweries showed
up with their A-game, though.
We were severely disappointed in
Red Hook Brewery for bringing
its Long Hammer IPA and Audible Ale—both solid beers, but also
both readily available at numerous
retail locations on O‘ahu. We were
similarly disappointed in Coronado Brewing Company for bringing
its Islander IPA and Orange Avenue Wit and in the Widmer Brothers for their choices of Alchemy
Ale and Upheaval IPA.
Still, with delicious pūpū cooked
up and served by some 25 different local and chain restaurants and
pop-ups, and a wealth of excellent company and conversation to
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compliment the wonderful brews,
the 3,000-attendee strong festival
was a huge success.
The seeming contradiction between a major, national-scale beer
festival and the small-town Kona
vibe is a big part of what makes
the festival so special. Isn’t it great
that, on the most remote archipelago in the world—the center
of the Pacific—craft brewers from
all across the continental United States can come to exchange

knowledge and build friendships
with the brewers of Hawai‘i’s burgeoning craft beer industry?
But, while covering the event
and sampling the above beers was
an epic good time, the real beauty
of the trip for Rob and me lay in
the land and its people.
The trip was a golden opportunity to network, make friends and
explore a part of Hawai‘i that we’d
never seen before. Everywhere we
went life seemed, well, better.

slopes of coffee bushes growing in
the sun. Continuing south, we visited Kealakekua Bay and the beautiful Hale O Kekuewa, with its fish
ponds, heiau and enormous palm
tree groves.
At Hapuna Beach Park (about
an hour north of Kailua) we caught
waves and talked with some local
body surfers about the swell (it was
supposed to be bigger, but Maui
blocked a lot of the waves generated by the north-Pacific storm
that weekend). We reveled in the
cleanliness of the beautiful beach
park, which featured an abundance of lovely, grill-equipped
pavilions and strategically placed
waste receptacles (not so close that
they stink up the meal, but not so
South of Kailua, we sampled far that people litter rather than
Kona coffee while enjoying the use them) and observed a healthy
view of vineyard-like, terraced mix of tourists and locals enjoying

the beach together—all things we
struggle to find here in the City
and County of Honolulu.
In North Kohala, we drove to
the very end of the road and were
blown away by Pololū valley and
the sea cliffs of the northern big
island—reminiscent of the cliffs of
northern Moloka‘i, near Kalaupapa, or Kaua‘i’s Nā Pali coast.
By the time we were getting
ready to board our return flight
to Honolulu (which, because we
really didn’t want to go, we almost
missed), Rob and I had both said,
several times, that we wanted to
move to Kona—only half jokingly,
I might add.
We came because of our love for
beer, but we left with a greater love
for this wonderfully different part
of Hawai‘i life. All over; mo’ bettah: Kona—we will return. ■
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