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The 2024 Borefts beer festival line-up included a couple of breweries each from the US and Brazil. Let's start with the Americans.

Lost Abbey was a blast from the past. Time was, this was a veritable whale generator, turning out highly ornate barrel-aged limited editions of the sort anyone with a mashtun and an old bourbon cask can do these days. They paid tribute to the Low Countries by bringing a Flanders red to Bodegraven, called Red Poppy. This is 6.5% ABV and a deep, dark red-brown, the colour of dried blood. It has the requisite cherry character in the aroma but it's a little sticky and overdone, suggesting jam rather than fruit. I see that they've used actual cherries, which is cheating a bit. And yet the flavour doesn't bring that through in any form, unfortunately, instead prioritising the oak: stale and rather oxidised tasting. It does have the spritzy fizz which is part of the spec, but there should be a spritzy sour-fruit flavour to alongside it, and that's missing. Whatever foeder or barrel process they've used, I think they've overdone it.

Much later, I picked up their Serpent's Stout, an 11% ABV imperial job and one of their regular seasonals. For all that, I found it quite rough and raw. It is extremely bitter, packed with high-cocoa dark chocolate, concentrated espresso roast and a strange herbal quality, suggesting oregano to me. I usually have a lot of time for the bitterer sort of imperial stout, but this went too far for my liking. The festival was full of smooth and mellow imperial stouts, and this was a jarring outlier among them. Barrel-aged versions exist, and I'm guessing they're more what I would like. This tasted not-quite-finished.

The other Americans were The Bruery. I associate them with big, barrel-aged dark beers but was intrigued to see they had brought something at just 3.5% ABV: the table beer called Petite Provision. I didn't really need a palate-cleanser when I drank it, 90 minutes after the festival opened, but I was happy to try it regardless. Both the flavour and aroma are a bright and clean melon and pear effect, with a slightly stricter mineral bitterness near the finish, a squeeze of lemon and just enough of an earthy saison note to make it true to style. There's a lot going on, but none of it lingers and the aftertaste is minimal. The rougher and grittier sorts of table beer aren't for me; this one is pure refinement, making the most of what table beer can be.

Also on their page of the menu was a brown ale called Enthaiced. This could have done with some hyphens: En-Thai-ced; Thai and enticed. That's a reference to the recipe including chai tea, dulce de leche and vanilla. As a brown ale fan, I'm not keen on it being used as a base for silliness, and also think that 13.9% ABV puts it well out of the scope for proper brown ale. It smells sweetly herbal, like red vermouth, and despite the strength is quite light and very fizzy. That doesn't hide the alcohol, and it tastes as hot as might be expected given the strength. In there with the booze is a coconut cake flavour, and the gentle spicing of a mince pie. It's an odd combination and I didn't really care for it. Like Lost Abbey's stout, it would benefit from some maturation and mellowing out.

I don't get to drink much Brazilian beer so put an effort in to make use of what was available this weekend. That began with Crisp, a pilsner from Croma of São Paulo. This slightly hazy affair is indeed very very crisp: dry and brittle, like a water biscuit. It's hazy too, and has a light lemony flavour, as you might find in a kellerbier. This lasts long into the finish, buoyed up on a full 5% ABV. It's a great example of whatever sub-style you want to stick on a hazy pils: extremely refreshing, effortlessly drinkable, and yet with bags of interesting character, should you wish to sip it instead.

Before long I returned to the Croma stand to try their New Zealand hopped IPA, NZ Power!. The name, and punctuation, is a warning that it's 7% ABV and not to be taken lightly. I wasn't impressed by the plasticky aroma; the sort of thing I get from Germanic hops in very traditional styles; usually pale bocks. This isn't that, though. The flavour is massively fruity, exuding a gorgeous mix of grapefruit and lemon: the pith, the peel and the flesh. This is seasoned with thyme and oregano notes, marking it as distinct from the more usual American-style hop bomb. Despite the distance travelled it tasted beautifully fresh and offered an invigorating wake-up call to a palate that was beginning to feel the strain at this stage. But onwards!

Spartacus, from Juiz de Fora in the great state of Minas Gerais, is our second Brazilian brewery, and we stick with IPA for one called Hit the Silk. I don't know why. This is 9% ABV and very hazy, yellow to the point of almost looking green and with far too much foam on top. It has a soft texture and surprisingly little heat given the prodigious strength. The aroma is alluringly peppery and there's a big hit of grapefruit in the foretaste: a west-coast sensibility which I wasn't expecting. There's not much else, however, only a hint of grit in the finish. While it does have the usual drawbacks of strong hazy IPA it can't muster enough character of its own to be more than broadly decent. 

Each year the festival has a theme and attending breweries are encouraged to brew a beer to match it. I remember when this used to be about ingredients and processes but now it seems to be just a name. Spartacus had four versions of a 15% ABV barrel-aged imperial stout, all given the festival theme name of Back & Future. I tried two. Back & Future 1 has coffee and our old friend dulce de leche. The result is a gorgeous traybake of a beer, giving me chocolate, biscuit crumbs, caramel, honeycomb, brown sugar and sweet coffee on a smooth and sumptuous base. Amazingly, it's not especially boozy, and worryingly easy to drink. This is exactly the sort of thing I come to the Borefts festival for.

Back & Future 2 uses strawberry, coconut and marshmallow. This one is very thick, sticking to the side of the glass when swirled. There's a warm chocolate aroma and a flavour like Raspberry Ruffle bars: that mix of highly volatile berry essence and bitter dark chocolate. All three add-ons are separately tasteable and obvious, but also well integrated into the whole piece. Nothing feels tacked on or gimmicky. It may not have the beatings of the previous beer, but it's still a better sequel than its near namesake.

There's just one more brewery to cover, the obvious one, before we finish up at Borefts for another year. That's coming next.