Going to this festival was sort of like going to Disney World, if instead of rides Disney World served beer. Basically, you get in line for a few minutes, and then you’re rewarded with a little bit of beer. Then you get in line again. If I could do two things over, one of them would be that I would wear gloves to the event, because your glass gets really sticky. Also, I would thread pretzels onto string, and wear a pretzel necklace, as I saw other people doing. When you saw people wearing a pretzel necklace, you knew they were pretty experienced at beer festivals, because they had a means of both cleansing their palates and getting a little snack.
So, we just drank and drank for hours. We had some good beers, we had some bad beers (Great Divide and Tommyknocker breweries, I’m looking at you regarding that second one. I don’t care if you are from Colorado.). The boys drank more than I did, but they have more places to put it. But here’s another thing you should know about going to a beer festival, in addition to the tips about gloves and pretzel necklaces: you should probably wear a plain t-shirt. Don’t wear a t-shirt with anything else on it.
Now, maybe other people would disagree with me on this. My brother George wore a Virginia Tech t-shirt and my brother William wore an Appalachian State t-shirt. Both of them had lots of people yelling out encouraging things about those schools’ sports teams. I guess it can be a good way to meet people. But I wore my John Steinbeck t-shirt, which I have mentioned several times on this blog, and it brought me nothing but trouble. First off, people were asking me if I’d read books that I hadn’t read--the obscure John Steinbeck books. And I hadn’t, so that made me feel unaccomplished. Eventually I got so drunk that I answered all questions about books with, “Of course I read it! I loved it! Changed my life!” but I don’t want to live life that way. So I can’t wear that shirt again until I complete the entire Steinbeck catalogue.
The second unfortunate thing was that some guy tried to use this shirt as a means of hitting on me, except he thought that all the titles on the back of the shirt were song lyrics and not books. So I was not impressed with him. I tried to give him the stink-eye as I waited for my two brothers to come over and defend my honor, but apparently brothers are no good at defending honor when they’ve had 15 beers. Then some brewer apparently mistook me for my brother William’s girlfriend and he nearly barfed. Those were some low points of the day for me. One of the high points, just to reverse these negative aspects, was that we ate kettle corn.
The festival was held on a softball field. My dad played softball there when we were younger, and one time he hit a home run out of that park. I remember talking about that a lot. We tried to re-live our childhood a little bit by sitting together in the dugout, as we used to do when Dad was playing. George and William went out to get another beer and told me they’d be back in a few minutes. When they didn’t return for almost 20 minutes I got a little concerned that they’d left me there. Then I realized I didn’t care because I was so drunk and they’d left me the bag of kettle corn. It was kind of a nice feeling.
At one point I was trying to keep notes about the beers I tried, but they all seem meaningless to me now. The only really constructive thing I wrote was that Triangle Brewing of North Carolina had an Xtra Pale Ale that was the “Sprite of Beers” and I meant that in the nicest way possible. It must have been fizzy and light. The last thing I learned on Saturday was that if you drink for 5 or 6 hours in the hot sun, then you will go to bed promptly at 8:30 p.m.
And now some pictures!
Here we are at the beginning of the festival:
And here we are pretty close to the end of the festival:
And here I am with some local celebrities:
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