Beer "Fest" not "Festival"

In my lifetime, I’ve been to three beer festivals and one wine festival. A year ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited me to an outdoor wine tasting festival in the sweltering heat of Austin.  It was an amazing time.  I don’t remember much of it. 

What I do remember is that my brother bought a couple huge knives from a tent vendors and got a great deal on them.  I also vaguely remember testing out a knife on a celery stalk the vendor had left out for precisely that purpose. Because, you know, letting extraordinarily drunk people chop vegetables with extraordinarily sharp knives makes complete sense. I left a small piece of my thumb with the celery and immediately stopped. Then my brother bought $300 worth of knives.  I could vouch for their sharpness.

It was surprisingly easy to drink wine in the heat, though I think I opted for the white ones.  In my old age I’ve started drinking more white wine.  Generally, it’s harder to be pretentious about lighter colored things. It’s easier to figure out if a white wine is good or bad.  Red wine, on the other hand, is supposed to taste like leather and tobacco.  I don’t have a problem with red wine, I’m just not smart enough to figure it out.  I know that I prefer a chalky dry white, like a Sauv Blanc.  Something you can eat oysters with.  On the other hand, I’ll drink just about any red wine you bring me.

Until my trip up to Los Olivos, CA, better known as Sideways wine country, I preferred reds because I thought they were smarter.  Then I had a late harvest viogner, and was blown away.  Evidently, late harvest denotes that the vintner lets the grapes shrivel on the vine and then harvests them.  The grapes effectively rot on the vine, imparting a peculiar sweetness like an after dinner drink.  If there’s any oenophiles out there that care to correct me, feel free, I could be wrong. Anyway, it was and remains the best wine I’ve ever tasted. 

So I was disappointed when, at the beer festival on Saturday, there was a surprising lack of learning opportunities.  Out of the 10-15 breweries, only two or three of them were new to me.  21^st Amendment is a brewery I don’t know much about but was curious to try, and their two very mini kegs were kicked in the first hour before I found them.  I was happy to find the Terrapin cart, though.  Their Hopsecutioner was the best beer at the festival and one of my favorites.  But I know the IPA well. 

My favorite and most mystifying addition to the beer festival was the Bud Light tent. Their tent took up an entire corner of the venue and at first glance appeared to be a beer garden.  But why would a beer festival need a beer garden?  A closer inspection of the 30 tables and the hundreds of people underneath it revealed the tent was a Beer Pong Emporium.  Evidently, for an additional $15 people could purchase a pitcher and 20 cups from a nearby stand, grab a table, and start playing.  Balls and pitcher refills were provided at no additional charge.  It was equal parts amazing and shameless. The tent flew in the face of everything that beer festivals are about – small breweries offering a limited supply of their fine brew to a discerning crowd.  Nope, not bud light, whose motto is clearly Quantity Not Quality. Maybe Atlanta is just more honest than the other festivals I’ve been to.  Getting shitcanned is an accidental side effect at most festivals.  The Atlanta Beer Fest made it a priority.  Everything tastes better when everything tastes the same.

Regardless of the oddities, I had a terrific time and whoops accidentally got shitcanned. 

Let’s call a spade a spade – at the end of the day, the Atlanta Beer Fest was as much of a “Beer Festival” as a Ke$ha show is a “concert.”  The night concluded with a mediocre band named God Knows What playing to a throng of not-so-accidentally shitcanned locals who could neither hear nor see straight enough to know what they were swaying to.

In other words, to 99 percent of the people there the night was a raging success.