DENVER — Kegs lined the Colorado Convention Center Wednesday night as the setup for the 2018 Great American Beer Festival (GABF) wraps up.
4,000 beers were wheeled to the booths of the 800 breweries presenting their best brews at the big beer fest. Thursday is the first day of the celebration.
160 Colorado breweries will be there, the highest representation of any state at the festival.
Five of those Colorado breweries, and two others that are not participating in GABF, are part of the "Brewers for Clean Water" campaign.
They made a pledge to do what they can to help keep our waterways clean and promote clean water handling.
It’s a pledge that the Maumee Bay Brewing Company in Toledo, Ohio also made. Maumee Bay Brewing wanted to do more to spark a conversation about clean water so a new murky, green brew was born.
"It was funny, one summer we were all sitting out back at the picnic table and we all noticed the algae that was in the river and we all said, 'we should someday make a beer that looks like that,' and of course being brewers - we did," said Craig Kerr, the brewery manager at Maumee Bay Brewing.
The beer is called the "alegae bloom," and it looks like the toxic algae that pollutes the water in Lake Erie every year.
"We have a lot of farms around this area so there is a lot of runoff that goes into the lake and that is really the primary source of where the algae bloom comes from," Kerr said.
One year, back in 2014, it was so bad the water system in Toledo was shut down for several days.
"This one was extremely serious and it actually shut down the water system in Toledo for about a four day period," he said.
That's what inspired the brew, which is made with kiwi, green tea, and dyed with algae to give it its color and look.
"(We) finally came up with a beer that not only tastes unusual, but also looks unusual,” ” Kerr said. “And that was part of the goal as an awareness campaign – to make a beer that didn't look like other things so when it went onto a table at a restaurant people would look across the room and see something that looks very odd and spark a conversation.”
Kerr told 9NEWS some people have said they won't drink algae, but he assures us it is a very good beer.
"We make beer for a living, so we had to make a beer that tasted good, and we wanted to make something that was different," he said. "Kiwi and the tea is a pretty unusual combination of flavors.”
It is safe to drink, but unfortunately, Maumee Bay Brewing Company is a small brewery local to Toledo, so you can only try it in Ohio and Michigan, where it is distributed. The brewery will not be at the GABF.
"This is a beer that we jokingly say we hope we never have to make again, because we said we're going to make this beer when the algae bloom appears on the lake and we'll stop making it when the algae bloom goes away," Kerr said.
And it may be awhile before that algae bloom ever disappears.
