Pressed against me, chest-to-chest, stood a middle-aged man. We were in the thick of the crowd at the Beveridge Craft Beer Ice Fest in Wolfeboro, shuffling and squirming through a dense pack of hundreds.
Through the chaos, we laughed and he said, “Why fight the current? No use in battling inexorable forces.” He was right. As one doctor of journalism famously said, “No, no — calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.”
Whether we were losing or not, I’m still not quite sure, but we indubitably had drained a couple, and everything was starting to lose significance. Buy the ticket, take the ride …
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Wolfeboro’s Beveridge Craft Beer Ice Fest normally takes place on the frozen sprawl of Mirror Lake’s 19-Mile Bay, but, in 2023, was moved indoors to O Bistro at the Inn on Main.
About an hour had passed since the kick-off of Wolfeboro’s ninth annual beer fest, which goes down the first Saturday of each February. A good time? Absolutely. The vibrations, however, were far from normal.
According to standard proceedings, the festivities take place on the frozen sprawl of Mirror Lake’s 19-Mile Bay, an inlet just north of Lake Winnipesaukee’s main body. Thirty or so craft brewers from all over New England set up shop on the icy expanse, dishing out 2-ounce pours to their heart’s content as attendees slip, slide and sip their way to chilly, beer-soaked bliss.
But this year, things were a little different. With temperatures dipping to 20 below zero, and wind chill pushing that to 40 below, a nice day on the ice was all but a mirage.
At the eleventh hour, Lisa Beveridge, director of the event and owner of Wolfeboro’s Beveridge Craft Beer & Soap Co., decided to move the fest indoors to O Bistro at the Inn on Main, a barn-like wedding venue designed to house 250 people. Beveridge sold nearly 800 tickets (or so one brewer told me).
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Chelsea Crockett, the sales and distribution manager at Twin Barns Brewing Co., hands out slushy pours in negative-20-degree weather.
This bold decree came on the heels of the previous year’s weather conditions. In 2022, a Nor’easter blew through Wolfeboro on Ice Fest Saturday; Beveridge pushed the event a day later, to Sunday. With a bounty of attendees booking hotels well in advance, and a workday looming from the other side of the weekend, it wasn’t exactly a popular decision.
So for 2023, with unexpected winter weather wreaking havoc once more, Beveridge held the date firm and ushered the festivities indoors. The move had its merits: Beveridge and company set up fire pits, a pretzel truck and a few breweries in the parking lot, and encouraged attendees to circulate through the venue and back outdoors to mitigate congestion. Still, it would all make for a vastly different experience from years past.
“It’s on the ice — that’s why she designed this thing, to be on Lake Winnipesauke,” one guy told me, waiting in the outdoor porta-john line. “But she made the right move, what with the winds and the cold. The beer will freeze, man. I mean, I give her a lot of credit, pulling this together at the last minute.”
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At the Beveridge Craft Beer Ice Fest, attendees can expect more than your run-of-the-mill IPAs:
Dover’s Auspicious Brew (above) offered a variety of hard kombucha, and Northwoods Brewing Co. (below) poured its Cavelight Porter.
I heard one person refer to it as a “superspreader” event, which, in the wrong circumstances, it very well could’ve been. Someone else called it “intimate bonding,” also an appropriate term for the close- quarters cramping. Whatever your perspective, the 2023 Beveridge Ice Fest brought a whole lot of New Englanders together to drink a whole lot of beer — which is exactly what we signed up for.
Walking through the doors just before the festival’s official start time of noon, the crowd already throbbed. Just about every imaginable accoutrement piled atop attendees’ fabric mountain bodies — pretzel necklaces, beer hats, full-body banana costumes, orange jumpsuits, ski goggles, bright plastic Mardi Gras beads, and nearly anything else capable of squeezing over two-plus pairs of pants and bulking outer layers. With the energy high, my crew (photographer Alyssa “Beans” Doust and my roommate, Joe Jorgens) stepped up to a beer booth.
Image may be NSFW.
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Saco River Brewing, out of Fryeburg, Maine, served us a milk stout and imperial IPA; Salem’s Notch Brewing poured a Bavarian Helles lager. All three were tasty, and both beer reps traded quips with ease, still mellow in the early stages of the fest.
Directly adjacent stood Peter LaPlante, owner and brewer of Rochester’s Back Hill Beer Co. LaPlante poured us his Okay, Then black IPA, a relatively rare brew.
“People who like it will come out of the woodwork to get it,” LaPlante said, “but that’s maybe 5% of the beer drinking population. The people who like it, though, will drive across the state to get a good black IPA.”
I could see why. The jet-black beer, featuring “Midnight Wheat” malt and the body of an IPA, clocked in as Joe’s favorite pour of the day.
Before we go any further, it’s important to mention that beer fests unravel in a wild frenzy. Walking booth to booth, chatting up each brewery rep and slugging down their offering in a hilariously small plastic cup, reality starts to slip away. Each pour gets you progressively drunker, each conversation gets progressively duller, and the mass of bodies hums — like an encroaching storm system — progressively louder, its presence ubiquitous and unrelenting. This last detail may be unique to the 2023 Ice Fest, but it certainly heightened the experience; one might liken it to a horse tranquilizer stabbed in the beer fest’s jugular, rendering everything stranger, harsher, more intense, more unsettling.
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Pretzel necklaces and beer hats are par for the course in beer fest culture.
The human wormhole, as it were, quickly absorbed us. It was inevitable. Within the eye of the storm, we had some startling existential reckonings. What if this was, instead, an oatmeal fest? Or a coffee fest? Those festival bathrooms would be a nightmare. Maybe they should’ve organized the event to have lines, instead of a swelling mass of bodies. Maybe they did, and it simply got away
from them.
Sandwiched against Joe, Alyssa and a random guy, among countless others, I commented, “We’re like pigs being herded through.”
“Exactly,” the stranger said, “but I’ll take this trough.”
“Not bad slop,” I agreed. “One happy pig.”
“I’ve certainly had worse slop,” Joe said.
As we attempted to navigate beer booth to beer booth, the multitude sucked us in, whirled us around, and spit us back out at an empty spot in front of a new booth, where the same small talk ensued: “What’re you pouring? First year here? Where you guys from?”
After the next few stops stayed true to this itinerary, I realized we had to change tactics. Typical small talk, or even the standard tenets of journalism, would no longer do. In a pig pen of bacchanalia, with hundreds of inebriated Granite Staters closing in from all sides, negative-20-degree-weather threatening from outside, and an ever-increasing blood alcohol content threatening from inside, conventional etiquette seemed trite. This wasn’t a normal day or a normal beer fest, and it certainly didn’t feel like normal life. Why pretend that it was?
We loosened our proverbial ties. If the day was chaos, we would have to be agents of chaos ourselves.
With a newfound zeal, we brainstormed oddball questions to keep the brewery reps on their toes. Our outtakes included, “If you could marry me right now or never see me again, which one would you choose?” (too strange); “How’s your relationship with your father?” (too personal); “How’s your relationship with God?” (too religious). We settled on, “How many third-graders could you fend off before becoming overwhelmed?” deeming it the perfect balance of wacky and engaging.
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A staffer for Baxter Brewing Co., based in Lewiston, Maine, offers a pour during the Beverage Craft Beer Fest in Wolfeboro in 2023.
We zeroed in on the good folks at Woodstock Inn Brewery as our first targets. Arthur (their New Hampshire and Massachusetts sales rep) and his fiancée, Chelsea, were a likeminded cabal; I could see the exhaustion in their eyes from the same-ol’ runaround (“What’re you pouring? First year here? Where you guys from?”).
Teed up with our third-grader question, they didn’t hesitate. “I’m a coach, dude,” Arthur said. “Bring ‘em on. I’d say 23 — just circle kung fu kicks all the way around; just grab two and use them as weapons and keep going.”
“I would say two,” Chelsea said. “Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the more of them, the better, because they entertain each other. It’s always better when our boys have friends over, because there’s more of them, so I’m changing my answer to 12.”
Respectable. The couple also enlightened us on the Woodstock Inn’s storied history. A nearly three-decade veteran of the craft beer scene, you might know the brewery for their Pig’s Ear Brown Ale, a personal favorite (I’m a sucker for a good brown ale) and New England grocery store staple. The inn itself has been around for over 40 years — to which Arthur called it one of the “definitive getaways” of the Granite State.
We continued on our path, reenergized and ready to taste more brews. Rich, representing Northwoods Brewing Co., handed us a sticker that read “I’m not the owner, I’m the beertender!” underneath a cartoon version of his face. He called their bakery’s crullers “BLEEPING stupid,” which I’ve heard corroborated, albeit in different terms, and said the following of the brewery’s Cavelight Porter: “All night long … yeehaw.” If I ever find myself in Northwood, I’ll be stopping by to hear Rich hold court.
A lightning round of pours ensued: the light and tasty Lucid American Lager, from Manchester’s Backyard Brewing; The Belgian Quad, a surprisingly smooth, not-too-hoppy 9.4% beast from Frost Heave Brewery; and Henniker Brewing Co.’s Flap Jack Double American Brown Ale — rustic, robust and made with local maple syrup.
So many incredible beers called out from any and every booth, all of them different expressions of varying palates and personalities. And that’s exactly what’s special about a beer fest: You get to see, side by side, sip by sip, the different ways different brewers imprint their tastes on established styles. Ten artists can paint the same subject and create 10 very different paintings; the same can be said of 10 brewers all making the same beer style.
Trying an abundance of beer, one after another, unfurled a monsoon on the mind and the palate — just another wonderful overstimulation adding to the sensory overload all around us. The party kept rolling, the flavors kept changing. What wasn’t to love?
The time had come: We zipped up our coats, replaced our gloves, and stepped outside into the frozen tundra.
Somehow the people outside were even wilder than those inside. A real party vibe resonated through the parking lot, now that everyone had a little room to operate and weren’t being herded around like, well, pigs to the slop.
Chanting, bantering and a good deal of shouting ensued — seemingly to ward off the ever-intrusive cold. And here’s the thing: It actually worked. The ramped-up energy funneled our attention into pure, unadulterated adrenaline, lending a cold shoulder to our increasingly cold fingertips.
Littleton’s Wildbloom Beer and Meredith’s Twin Barns Brewing Co. handed out beer slushies in the strong wind, doing all they could to fuel the party. Meadow, Wildbloom’s Belgian-style triple, and Twin Barns’ Einer Noch Kölsch and Hat Trick New England TIPA each plopped into our cups and down our esophagi, more spiked shaved ice than liquid beer. The breweries poured them straight from the can, seeing as tap lines would instantly freeze up. All three pours were refreshing, frosty and just what we needed in the arctic atmosphere. We lasted 20 minutes before the cold got the best of us. Back into the barn.
We made our final rounds inside — the highlight being an array of hard kombucha from Dover’s Auspicious Brew — before our engines petered out. Three hours of nonstop sipping and shooting the breeze will do the trick, and we were ready to call it a day, although still riding the festival’s high.
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Joe Jorgens holds two 5-ounce plastic cups —
the standard receptacle at most beer festivals.
Boarding a shuttle bus, it became apparent that everyone was still riding the festival’s high. We were greeted with a brick wall of cheering, exclaiming, clapping and high-fiving. About what, exactly? I’m not so sure. I don’t even think I knew in the moment.
Listening back to the tape, we all passionately intoned, “One more beer, one more beer, one more beer,” and, in retrospect, it wasn’t the least bit literal. The festival stretched further and further behind us, and everybody’s plastic cups grew drier by the second. At a time like that, nobody wants the fun to end. Even when the cans are empty, the cups crushed, the sun setting, you want to ride that wave as long as possible, clasping on to even the smallest semblance of an excuse to be excited.
After chanting our bus driver’s name (Phil) over and over again, a man at the front of the bus exclaimed, in one quick, shotgun-burst of breath, “What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs and you throw him in a hole? PHIL!!!!” I guess, in a big stretch of the imagination, that joke makes sense. In the moment, though, I had no idea what it meant. It didn’t matter. I screamed my lungs out in exultation.
In the dead of winter, when the days are short, the nights long, and the temperatures sink into subzero horrors, people need something to rally behind. We need a reason to leave the house for more than just a grocery trip. And if it’s supporting local business — specifically, blue collar community members making a craft product they believe in — then I can get behind that.