A Montana beer encore

Helena's Memorial Park already hummed by the time I walked up. The VIP line was lengthy but moved fast. In a few minutes I had my glass and was ready to taste at the Montana Brewers Association Summer Rendezvous.

I wanted one more beer festival in the Last Best Place. If this marks my last beer festival, I ended up on a strong note. For the first time in a decade, I entered a Montana Brewers Association festival. 

Instead one annual festival, MBA has switched to holding regional Beer Rendezvous events, which definitely have a more local feel. That’s good. I felt like I was among people who lived down the street, and no one treated me any differently for traveling several hundreds of miles to drink with them. In Memorial Park, two-twenty Montana breweries poured their wares. 

I can’t buy any of these brews without a drive deep into Wyoming (the only type of drive Wyoming offers if you're going beyond Cheyenne or Laramie), if not Montana itself. 

Beer was the highlight, but I tried to spend time with some other vendors. I had a good talk with the staff from the Montana State University Agricultural Department about what makes Montana beer different. 

Most people don’t realize Montana has a “golden triangle” of grain farms among its many visual delights. The grains and hops are mostly grown locally. Montana’s wheat and barley crops only trail cattle in agricultural commodities. 

Some breweries draw water from local aquifers. Local fruits, especially chokecherries and huckleberries, liven up many summer brews. The beer ends up being a local experience every time. 

Only a few are distributed as far south as Colorado, and most never leave the state. I had a bingo on the MBA card for a range of topics, from a beer with non-citrus fruit (hello, huckleberries) to a brewery further from 80 miles from Helena (thank you, Otium Brewery of Miles City). 

I needed to stay until 7 p.m. to see if my bingo card won, but I walked out sooner than that. I hit my beer saturation point. Visiting solo, I just drink faster, and after a certain point I tasted all I wanted. The cooler was fully loaded for drinking once back in Colorado. 

Not that I’m complaining. The MBA Rendezvous gave me all the beer I needed to touch every corner of Montana from a park in the shadow of the state capitol.