Breweries Showcased at Hops Fair

By Mark Garland

One nice thing you notice in a microbrew beer tent is that everyone's smiling. And despite a showing of only three breweries, the tent at the second annual Madison County Hop Fair in Oneida, New York was no exception. Several hundred people spent much of their hot August 2, Saturday afternoon sampling ales from the likes of Mike Bauer of the Sacket's Harbor Brewing Company, a brewpub offering a very sweet 1812 Pale Ale and a mild brown ale that won a bronze metal in Chicago at last year's World Beer championships.

Next, Steve Schmidt of the Empire Brewing Company, offered plenty of homebrewing advice as well as an "all pale malt" Pale Ale and a very genuine, refreshing HefeWeizen.

The third and by any estimate extremely popular table featured authentic English ales from the Middle Ages Brewing Company. A busy volunteer manned the Apricot Ale and Syracuse Pale Ale taps, while President Mary Rubenstein poured from bottles of White Night Ale, Grail Ale and Beast Bitter, which she kept pulling from an ice-filled cooler.

Outside, two home-brewing booths included a table filled with equipment, mixes, books and advice from The Brew Haus (Cazenovia, NY), and a larger table with many more supplies, as well as a highly instructive start-to-finish Honey Cream Ale brewing demonstration from The Home Brewery in Syracuse, NY. The New Woodstock Regional Historical Society and the Pompey Historical Society occupied nearby booths.

Inside the main building, the region's hop growing history was on display with plenty of pictures, memorabilia and equipment, including a field picker's turn of the century, 32 bushel wooden hop box, wooden hand tools, a frame and stretched-cloth hop shovel, antique hop-hawking signs, a model of a period hop kiln building and a 180 lbs (pressure) hop press invented by Lewis Harris, of Waterville NY.

Horse drawn wagons, an 1864 Abbott and Downing stage coach, and bottles of hop elixir described in a 100 year old advertisement as a cure for "Dyspepsia, kidney and urinary tract disease, nervousness, indigestion, liver complaints and general debility!" were not for sale, but plenty of buttons, caps, t-shirts, potted hop plants and a hope-yeast bread were selling well. Entertainment was provided by story tellers in period dress, folk singers, lecturers, pony rides, games, and the crowning of the hop royalty--followed by yet another round of smiles in the beer tent.

Copyright 1997, Great Lakes Brewing News. No material herein may be reprinted without permission of the Great Lakes Brewing News Distributed On the W3 For personal, non-commercial enjoyment and use only. Cheers!