In Beer, We Trust: Mikkeller Festival Makes This Hardened Beer Expert Feel All the Feelings

For us beer geeks, Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen (MBCC) is one of the world’s best beer festivals. Like Glastonbury in the UK for music fans, or La Tomatina in Spain for people who like throwing tomatoes at each other, it's a bucket list festival, that everybody who loves brew should attend at least once in their lifetime. Organized by the eponymous Danish brewery Mikkeller, the event brings together top-notch breweries from around the world, and people travel for thousands of miles to enjoy the free-flow selected beers over two days. Oh, and the tickets are normally sold out months before the event.

READ: When Beer Beckons: Asia's Best Beer Festivals This Autumn

I was heartbroken not be able to travel to Copenhagen in May for the main event, but I was lucky enough to travel to Tokyo for the leg of the festival there over Sep 23-24 – the first time that Mikkeller has brought their orgy of beer to Asia. And an orgy it was, with 320 beers from 40 breweries from Asia, Europe, and the US.

Unlike in previous years in Copenhagen, MBCT was held outside, on a baseball field at Meiji Jingu Gaien Softball Grounds. Why Tokyo? “We really think that Mikkeller Beer Celebration is the best beer festival in the world, and we want to bring it to other parts of the world and share it with new people. At the same time, Tokyo is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I can’t wait to show it to all of my friends from the beer world,” explains Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, founder and CEO of Mikkeller. “Right from the festival’s very beginning, we have insisted that the brewers participate in the festival and not just send a representative. This has contributed to the high standard and its high reputation in the beer world.”

Each of the two sessions per day costs around RMB 835 to attend – not inexpensive by any means – and all-session pass was RMB 2,800, while the golden all-session pass that allowed you to get into each session 20 minutes early was RMB 3,680. Much better than the system in Beertopia in Hong Kong, which asks drinkers to buy the ticket and then purchase tokens to actually get beer, a MBCT ticket covers all free-flow beers on site.

Renowned breweries in attendance included Cloudwater (UK), Warpigs (Denmark), Bokkereyder (Belgium), Mikkeller (Denmark), Omnipolo (Sweden), To Øl (Denmark), Lervig (Norway), Young Master (HK), Anglo Japanese (Japan), DevilCraft (Japan) ... and Beijing's old friend Great Leap Brewing. Unfortunately, Pasteur Street’s beer didn’t pass the customs, and they just showed up with freebies to give away – a loss for us drinkers who were denied a taste of the World Beer Cup award-winning brews.  

Highlights from the festival were Lervig’s Passion Tang that was fermented with house ale yeast and had fruity, tangy, and woody characters; Great Leap’s Wild Wall Series Koelbrett Apricot that was funky, and tart, but balanced with a smooth and fruity finish (this one hasn’t been released back in China yet but was brought over specially for the beer festival). If you like your suds on the dark side, Warpigs' Smoldering Holes BA Bourbon with Mexican Vanilla was sweet with pudding, chocolate, cacao, and floral notes; Cloudwater’s Helles Tettnanger proved particularly smooth and elegant; Other Half’s Double Dry Hopped Chedder IIPA was intensely hoppy; Young Master’s Hak Mo Sheung Cherry Chocolate Stout had great cherry on the nose, and rich chocolate flavor, so much so that you immediately want to call your beer buddies and fly to Hong Kong to drink more; and finally 18th Street and Cycle’s co brew Saturday Barrel Aged Imperial Porter (with 16 percent ABV!) made for a great beer to call it a night.

I have to say that MBCT was the quietest beer festival I’ve ever attended. Don’t get me wrong, the venue was packed; but Japanese drinkers maintained a polite disposition and spoke in low tones throughout, and even though there was a certain amount of passion when the gold-pass crowds ran to the first stop (Bokkereyder brewery) to have a sample of their sours, they also reined in their thirst and immediately made a neat queue instead of elbowing each other out the way. The Mikkeller team provided vans instead of booths for bearded brewers to hand out their best brews, and the vans, combined with the soft lighting from fairy lights and white Japanese-style paper lanterns, brought an elegant and free-spirited touch to the pristine softball field.

All in all, it's clear that MBCT is not the type of beer festival where getting drunk is the objective, but instead is geared toward appreciating various unique beers as they come. While we started to feel tipsy, with the gentle mid-autumn breeze stirring the air, it all started to feel surreal, and we were overcome with happiness. After all, is there a better way to enjoy yourself than embracing the diversity of beer as well the many different people who create it? People say en vino veritas, but we say "in beer, we trust."

READ: Certified Beer Mania at 2016's Beertopia Hong Kong

More stories by this author here.

Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @flyingfigure
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Photos: MBCT, Tracy Wang, Izumi M.