Every summer the Burke Bike Park on Kingdom Trails, located in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, hosts the Burke Bike and Brew Festival. This August marked the fourth annual event and it was RAD! After shredding downhill runs in the park all day, participants get to sample and vote on heady beers from microbreweries like Shock Top, Shipyard, Harpoon, Long Trail, Trout River, Otter Creek, Wolaver's, and Magic Hat. A live band provides tunes while drunken revelers get silly with fun bike games like a foot down contest and of course the obligatory huffy toss.

The entertainment highlight of the evening is the freestyle jump demos and that where I come in. I design and build the trails in the Burke Bike Park and so when the management decided to host the first Bike n Brew in 2009 they approached me to do the build and invite some riders.  I promptly called all of my craziest friends and told them the good news "hey, we get to ride jumps while people watch and cheer and then eat free food and drink free beer". This is a dream come true for most dirt jumpers and combined with the knowledge that we would follow up with a jam on my backyard jumps the next day (thats another story) is enough to entice some of the best free riders in New England (fellow 5 10 athletes Joshua Gee and Kyle Ebbett to name a few.

In the beginning, the budget was small and so the the course was just a staging to dirt  5' drop to a 6' lip trick jump. I try to keep things fresh and so the set up has grow every year. 2010 the lead in drop grew to 8' and a bigger gap on the 6' lip. In 2011 the set up was a burly 25' step down, dirt lip gap into super boosty 7' kicker. My inspiration for this year's build came from above, literally. A big tree fell across my driveway and when I saw it, I thought "that will make a great cannon!"  I made the gap off the log 18' and set up a beautiful mellow 7 footer that I procured from Ebbett to loft us 20 feet to a monster lander. A mountain board demo adjacent to ours further enhanced the crowd’s enjoyment and they went wild.  

As we were shredding the hell out of this work of art I decided that it would have to become a permanent fixture in my backyard and so it shall, someday soon. This build with was my best yet and frankly I'm worried how I can make it better next year without a bigger budget.