Desperately Seeking Salem

I wish I could tell you that the first-ever Salem Beer and Cider Festival was a smashing success, that the beer flowed like water, the conversation flowed like laughter, and a jolly good time was had by all.

But that just isn’t the case.

Personally, I had a great time. I was there with a baby – one of scores of babies in attendance — and walked in to find all of my closest Salem friends, some of whom don’t even know each other, sitting at the same table. It was a round table of excellent faces and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of possibly, actually, maybe having achieved a little bit of constancy in my new hometown.

But my husband, and some of his friends, oh, if I can place the blame on them… they just weren’t too thrilled with the event as a whole, crediting the festival’s opaque token system, inadequate beer storage facilities (some of the beers were served warmish), and an overall lack of people with a a rather ambivalent verdict:

Not as great as it could be.

On any other day, I’m sure that the Mission Mill spinning room would have been a fine location for such an enterprise, but on a hot day like last Saturday, the heat sent some fleeing for the windows or down the elevator shaft to the outdoors.

If you could find the room at all. Signs to the festival pointed visitors in the direction of the Beer and Wine Festival.

Live music? Great idea. But the acts we were there for were so loud and the reverb so bad in that space that we could barely hold a conversation on the other side of the room.

Some of our favorite vendors were lined up serving their specialties — Venti’s and Adam’s Rib come to mind. But was anyone buying food on a day like this?I hope it was worth it for them.

And where, oh where were all of the people? I for one felt like you can’t call yourself a beer-swilling Salemite and not show up, but I guess I’m in the minority.

We left at 6. I’d be curious to hear how things progressed in the evening.

Perhaps Capital Taps will weigh in on the finer points of beer tasting. Being there with baby, I didn’t even get a swig.

I hope some of these items get ironed out for next year. I hope there is a next year for the festival.

By the way, there were two great blog posts previews before the event at Capital Taps and Poetry and Popular Culture.

The tone of the articles coming out about Oregon lawmakers mulling a system to reward establishments that pour accurate pints of beer would suggest that this is one of those silly, fun news stories that should be followed but not explored seriously.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Oregon has a well-developed beer culture and a closely-knit, world-renowned community of beer producers, drinkers and connoisseurs.

The attempt to assure an accurate pour represents no less than a watershed moment for Oregon’s beer culture.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: Germany, where beer is king, has had a “Society Against Deceptive Beer-Pouring” since 1970 and counts almost 4,000 people from around the world as members.

It helps that in Germany, the line is printed directly on the glass, assuring that even the consumer can see when a bartender shorts a pour.

But people get a little negligent when they start drinking. Enter the “Society Against Deceptive Beer-Pouring,” which sends out teams of beer detectives at Oktoberfest and other folk festivals to keep the bartenders honest.

This sounds like a joke, but it’s very real. Beer costs hard-earned money and beer drinkers should get what they pay for. Beer is, after all, the everyman’s drink.

I’m not sure a decal system, as proposed in the legislation and reported on in the article, is a good idea. Seems like it would be much easier to draw a line on the glass.

Whatever happens to the bill, I am tickled that Oregon takes its beer as seriously as the Germs.