Great American Beer Fest

My wife and I were there once. Never again will I attend that waste of money and time. Save your money and go to London the first week in August next year for the Great British Beer Festival. This festival is

Bruce

try portland Or third weekend of July. no sillyness, well except the fence around the part of the river where the beer tasting happens.

Except for the idiot frat-boy types going "whooooooooo!" every 15 minutes.

OBF's fine, but based on my one trip there, I had much more fun going around to various Portland pubs than the fest itself. The limit of one beer per brewery is just plain dumb, if you ask me, especially considering how way too many breweries bring in a beer that is hardly unique or difficult to get. SNPA? BridgePort IPA? You can't swing a dead cat in pretty much the whole US and not hit a bottle of SNPA, and BridgePort IPA is practically running from the taps in Portland.

For American beer festivals, two of the very best ones are in flyover land - Chicago's Real Ale Festival and the Great Taste of the Midwest in Madison. I've heard that there are a couple excellent festivals on the east coast, but seeing as I have zero experience with them I'm not going to comment on them.

OBF was the shiznit back in the day, but it's coasting on its laurels, if you ask me (and a few people I know in Portland).

-Steve

Went to the Garden State Brewers Festival in New Jersey a coupla weekends ago, so I'd say that NOT one of the "excellent ones". Held in a historic village's "green", they charged over $20 to get in. The brewers were set up on the outside of the green, the lines for the beer thus starting near the center, in the hot sun. Early arrivals set up lawn chairs in the center as well, so when the lines got long, they were a mess, with people on blankets and chairs in the way, lines criss-crossing each other, etc. To make standing in the hot sun even more annoying, they had a vendor selling cigars and all the macho guys on their "boys day out", just had to smoke those things, making some lines, with 3 or 4 cigar smokers in them, impossible to bear. (Yeah, that's the way to sample beer...with a cigar in your mouth. I thought that fad died...)

A four ounce glass was supplied (altho' they ran out and gave out slightly larger looking plastic cups later) but most brewers only filled that half way - fifteen minutes in line for 2 ounces of beer. (New Jersey law prohibited larger glasses, or more than one sample per person, according to notices.) No one seemed to have anything of interest or different than previous years, and often you did not even known WHAT was on tap until you got to front of the line. Lots of "Belgians" and other summer beer styles, of course. Brewers seemed disinterested in anything but keeping the line moving, and I noted several were pouring beer from pitchers rather than from the tap.

Triumph (from Princeton) had noted on their chalkboard they were going to tap an 8% Imperial Stout at 3:30 (one half hour before closing) and the line by 3 became so long it went beyond the tents opposite it, we said, let's get outta here (well, first we had a Pekuno's Hammer, which was pretty much the same thing...).

I decided I didn't really LIKE the concept of the beer festival. Seemed like a lot of people were there (mistakenly) thinking they could get really drunk fast. A most unpleasant way to sample the beers, especially considering the state is so small, one could easily visit most of them. I thought the year they held it in a hockey rink was weird, but in retrospect, I liked that better.