Spirits of Detroit: Best beer fest you've never heard of

There's a beer festival in Michigan where samples are unlimited, the taps pour all night, and you can walk to bed.

You could have the best blueberry-sour beer you've ever tasted from one booth, and from another an IPA you choke down or discreetly pour out.

"We can't make a profit on it; it's illegal to do that, but why bother?" said home-brewer Roger Dudley, 52, a lumber salesman from Highland. "We're doing it for fun. A 'Look, this is what I can do,' kind of thing."

He and other gregarious, passionate home-brewers explained the joys of the 6th annual Michigan Homebrew Festival last Friday night at the Groveland Oaks County Park Campground in Holly. Roughly 550 people attended the multi-day event, at which about 15 home-brew clubs shared a range of concoctions like nothing I've seen.

I'd happened upon the festival's Facebook page a few months earlier and figured it looked like a party. And it was, complete with a karaoke machine and an unwelcome visit from law enforcement Saturday night — more on that later.

Among the best pours: a mouthwatering peanut-butter porter made by a mechanical engineer from Port Huron and a pineapple mead aged about 5 years from a Waterford man who works for a conveyor manufacturing company.

My friends and I, all first-timers, stepped into the campground loop Friday night, taking a clockwise walk among the booths and meeting some of the most fascinating people. We'd reserved a campsite and paid membership dues in advance. It cost $30 to become a member and get a day-pass access to the festival; more for multi-day camping.

The creativity and camaraderie made this event sing. The Waterford man, Bob Landry, 51, poured me a mead made from orange Dreamsicle tea and Michigan wildflower honey. It had the most sophisticated flavor of anything I tasted that weekend. Like his pineapple mead, it was aged about 5 or 6 years, he said.

The first taste made me think of spiced sake. I told Landry as much, and he looked at me kind of incredulously.

"It's got to open up," he said. I gave it a moment and a kind of orange spice aroma began wafting from the cup.

The Homebrew Festival got its start after the Michigan State Fair was discontinued in 2009. The home-brewers wanted to continue an annual tradition of deciding who had the best beers, and there was already a club doing a yearly cookout, so they combined the events, explained festival organizer and founder Pat Hyde, 37, a siding contractor from Port Huron.

A saloon and a carnival

Well after sundown Friday, the country and western ballad "El Paso" by Marty Robbins played as I walked through the swinging saloon doors of the KGB (Kuhnenn Guild of Brewers) booth, where mead was served from glass jugs on one side and beer from taps on another. Someone suggested I ask for a "Sex Wit Bier in a Canoe," a wheat beer with strawberry lemonade, so I did.

I sat on a wooden chair at a table with one of the people who brewed it, Mike Leclerc, 31, of Warren, who works in health insurance. I asked how he and another home-brewer created what I was drinking.

It was pretty simple. First they made some wheat beer.

"We ended up just going to the store and adding some strawberry lemonade, a 32-ounce jug, poured some right in," he said, musing on the flavor. "For me, I don't end up getting much of the original beer flavor in it. ... It's mostly just the strawberry lemonade in it at this point."

The beer wasn't especially fancy. Then I asked about the magnificent dessert in his pan, the "booze cake" people in the booth were raving about. He made tiramisu but with "a lot more coffee" than normal, with the center layer changed to a brownie instead of cake, and some alcohol.

"There is literally Kahlua in everything but the brownie," Leclerc said, laughing. "It ends up about half a fifth through the whole cake."

Further around the loop, Joe Wiczko, 32, a mechanical engineer from Port Huron and his Black River Homebrew Club offered the most elaborate booth: A carnival atmosphere, with a popcorn machine, karaoke and plenty of counter space for chatting.

"I got 17 taps right there," Wiczko said. "That sounds a bit eccentric when I said that out loud."

He made the peanut-butter porter by adding dehydrated peanut butter and unsalted, dry-roasted peanuts to his robust porter that was so good it won second place in the porters category of the festival's competition. He said beer is taken seriously, but the mellow social scene is a big part of the fest.

"Everybody's just so chill, right?" he said at about 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

Big flames, cop cars

Alas, the chill factor deflated about 15 minutes later. A man, who appeared to have drank more than he could handle, half-crazed, started throwing wooden pallets on a campfire.

The flames rose to perhaps 10 feet, lapping uncomfortably close to a tree. An Oakland County Sheriff's Office deputy on patrol noticed the blaze, parked and walked up to the fire.

He ordered that nothing else be added to it.

"The fire got too big," Hyde said later. "This dude, he yelled at us for about a half hour about the fire being too big."

He said the deputies said they'd had calls earlier to nearby campsites about kids riding bikes, but that there weren't any kids riding bikes at the festival.

Then an amplified voice coming from the direction of the karaoke machine uttered something about police from track 2 of the "Straight Outta Compton" album, only that wasn't the song playing.

Deputies speed-walked into the tent and emerged, one of them with a man's arm in his hand, escorting him to a patrol vehicle. Moments later, he was released; apparently the culprit, like the guy who intensified the campfire, had fled through the darkened campground. More police cruisers arrived.

I was just about to get a pale ale from one of the booths as two deputies stepped in and ordered the taps shut off. Booth-by-booth, the deputies shut down lights and taps.

The fest was allowed to resume an hour later, but the presence had caused some people to disperse and the mood to dampen. The sheriff's office didn't immediately respond to a request Tuesday for an incident report and comment on the event's future.

After the shutdown, my friend Chris Shonk, 29, and I sat on a bench listening to a metro Detroit surgeon talk about the Burning Man festival. We had another beer and walked back to our tents.

Hyde said Tuesday that he's not sure the festival will be welcome at the campground next year, but they're hoping it will be. Either way, it'll happen somewhere, and a security company will be hired, he said.

I'm already looking forward to it. Shonk similarly enjoyed the fest and was impressed with the camaraderie.

"Craft beer can be about making profits, but this was clearly just about making good beer," he said. "I mean, they were giving it away and just loved talking about it."

Spirits of Detroit columnist Robert Allen covers alcohol for the Free Press. He can be reached at rallen@freepress.com or Untappd, raDetroit; Twitter, @rallenMI, Facebook,robertallen.news; and Periscope, @rallenMI.