Expect Saturday’s Olympia Brew Fest to be hazy and sour, and that’s a good thing

Saturday’s forecast calls for purple haze.

Don’t be alarmed, though; it’s not another symptom of climate change. Rather, Saturday is the seventh annual Olympia Brew Fest, where the haze will be not in the sky but in the beer and the purple comes courtesy of Seattle’s Purple Mane, which covers the songs of the late Prince, known for his penchant for purple – and, of course, for “Purple Rain.”

Tying the theme together is Let’s Go Hazy IPA (India pale ale) from Wild Ride Brewing of Redmond, Oregon, a name surely inspired by the late artist’s third-most-popular track of all time.

With food (including oysters from Chelsea Farms), live music and games, all in addition to 90 or so beers and ciders from 32 regional breweries, the festival might be a good place to party like it’s “1999.”

Brew Fest, a fundraiser for the Thurston County Chamber Foundation’s Small Business Incubator, is also a great place to explore the latest trends in craft brewing.

And a big trend is hazy beer, said festival organizer Mike Marohn. It’s kind of the apple cider of beers — thick and cloudy.

“It doesn’t get filtered as much,” he told The Olympian. “It’ll have a fuller mouthfeel.

“It’s generally done with the hoppier type of beer,” he said. “From my perspective, it seems to counteract some of the bitterness. It seems to balance it a little better.”

Another thing about hazy beers — or at least the ones at the festival — is that they seem to inspire puns. Take, for example, Fortside Brewing’s The Real Slim Hazy.

Another trend: sour beer, also called gose (pronounced goes-uh), which Refinery29 last month dubbed the successor to rosé. (Gose is the new rosé, though the comparison would have worked a lot better if the words rhymed.)

“All you really need to know about goses, and sours more generally, is that many of them are delicious and far more drinkable than your average beer,” the website’s Cait Munro wrote last month. “Which is probably why many people in the industry think they’re about to really blow up.”

Basically, though, anything goes. And it seems that the more creative and unusual a flavor is, the better. (Think Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans from the world of Harry Potter, though so far without such flavors as earwax.)

There’s chocolate cake beer (Icicle Brewing’s Dark Persuasion German Chocolate Cake Ale), peanut butter beer (Wild Ride Brewing’s Nut Crusher Peanut Butter Porter) and of course plenty of fruit beer, including Wander Brewing’s Plum Millie Sour — which takes us back to the burgeoning crop of sours.

There’s also beer that takes flavor from wine barrels, bourbon barrels or both, as in the case of Top Rung Brewing’s Red Wine Bourbon Barrel Aged Pyrolysis Imperial Stout. (The name alone is a mouthful.)

“It takes on some of the flavor characteristics of the wine and the bourbon,” Marohn said. “It’s an interesting combination. Because of the aging in both of those types of wooden barrels, it also seems to gain some alcohol.”

The Pyrolysis, in fact, is 11 percent alcohol by volume — compared to 4.5 percent for the average beer, according to the Alcohol Research Group of the Public Health Institute, and just below the 11.6 percent average for wine.

You get six 5.5-ounce tastes with your ticket purchase, so proceed with caution.

This story was originally published August 3, 2018 at 6:36 AM.