Beer

The Great American Beer Festival is a glorious event for beer lovers. So many beers to try, all in one place.

Christine and I went with a couple friends to the Saturday evening tasting session. The only other time I've gone to the festival was 4 or 5 years ago, and my how things have grown. According to the GABF site, the attendance has grown from about 28,000 when I came a few years ago to 46,000. I think they moved the tasting to a larger room and let a bunch more people in the past couple years. We showed up at the venue a little bit after the doors opened, and there was the most amazingly long line wrapping around the building. I bet between walking to the end of the line, and then following the line into the building, we walked at least a mile. Last time I went, we showed up at about the same time and enjoyed a short line.


With all the people at the festival, we amazing got into line at the same time as a couple dance friends (Kathy and Will) we haven't seen in a long time. Stranger coincidence. And if it's any indication of the size of the event, we didn't see them the rest of the evening once we got inside.

I have no idea how many beers we tried, but it was a lot. Some were great, some were terrible, and all of it was fun. Hopefully we can go again next year, but we may have to try a different tasting session so we can avoid some of the crowd. As it was the last tasting session of the weekend, a lot of the brewers were running out of beer (especially the award winners).