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Extreme Beer Fest 2010 – Part 1, 2 and 3

Part 1
I’m sitting on the couch anxiously awaiting the departure for Boston to attend Extreme Beer Fest 2010. Erin, Holly and Derrick took my car to get gas and coffee and I’m waiting for them to arrive. Oh! Here they are. Hooray!

Part 2
To make the drive more manageable we took a pit stop in Middletown, CT for lunch at a bar named Eli Cannon’s Tap Room. It was an eclectic divey place. Food was alright. Beer selection was pretty nice. Seemed like the type of place that would be a lot of fun at night. It was a worthy stop. With the stop, we completed the trip to Boston in about 6 hours and 30 minutes.

Friday night was pretty low key though it did include the ridiculous event I described in the previous post.

Saturday had an awesome plan. We headed to the Jamaica Plain section of Boston to tour the Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams). Derrick and Holly were staying at the Westin near Copley Square so we came from different directions. Our timing was a few minutes off but it afforded us the chance to grab a couple beers and pizza from a nearby restaurant while we waited for our tour time. We got to try and exclusive Sam Adams wheat beer served by the restaurant alone (Bella Luna). The tour itself was quite short but the tasting that accompanied it was great. We had a terrific guide and it was probably the best brewery tour I’ve ever done. Erin also took the opportunity to volunteer on the tour and was tasked at getting us to guess what beer ingredient she was acting out (she was hops and hopped in the air – very well done).

I took a short though must needed nap. I headed to the beer festival with a .00 blood alcohol level as measured by my new AlcoHawk Slim breathalyzer. Yes, that is correct, I made an amazing impulse purchase. It is not a toy! It is an instrument of science!

Part 3
Extreme Beer Fest was once again extreme and a great time. It was interesting being their with 5 other friends. Having the opportunity to discuss the beers with one another was half the fun of it. I personally took a sample of 29 different beers and took sips here and there from the group. Worst beer by far was Weyerbacher Idiot’s Drool which was some weird barrel-aged version of their normal beer Blithering Idiot. It was foul. The most interesting was a beer brewed with pickling spices from Wormtown Brewery. The best was a tripel from Allagash with Montgomery cherries. Interestingly enough, it was the first beer I sampled and I ended up having several glasses. There was some disappointment in the fact that many of the most obscure beers ran out well before the end of the night. All the same, I got to try a lot of winners that will never be in commercial production.

Wisely, we headed back to Mark and Kara’s to wind down for the evening. It was time for TV and pizza. Incidentally, we all took BAC readings and I took the prize at .18, Mark was .14, Kara was .12 and Erin (the responsible one) was .02. Science I tell you! The pizza was great and we had some really great laughs. I love Boston.

We took it easy on Sunday and followed the great tradition of visiting the Cactus Cantina for lunch. I had a tasty and freshly tapped Abita Jockamo IPA. We had a few last laughs before parting ways.

It took about 6 hours to get home which isn’t terrible. Another great trip to Boston.