Let me introduce Bathtub’s newest contributor, our guest blogger Ryan. Ryan is an avid eater and drinker who is currently working on the opposing goals of drinking his 500^th different beer and maintaining his path on the South Beach diet, which is being chronicled on his blog The Healthy Hog.

For whatever reason, my entire beer-loving experience has been based on milestones. When I first started to realize all of what beer had to offer — when I really started getting into it and paying attention, when I began to learn that there was more to exotic beer than Guinness and Killian’s, that there was even a world beyond the rare* Magic Hat #9 — I set a goal for myself: I wanted to try 200 different beers by the time I turned 40. At that point, age 25, I think I’d tried somewhere in the mid-40s, and it seemed like I was falling behind. I hit 200 in the waning days of 2009, right before I turned 28.

But by then I lived in Philadelphia. The options were endless. Trying a variety of different beers was no longer a challenge when there were bars with 200 on their list and stores that sold individual bottles of beer I’d never even heard of. I hit 300 in the four months after reaching 200 thanks to a small beer festival and a beer-swilling trip through Australia and New Zealand. This was easy now. I needed something else.

How about 100 different beers in three-and-a-half hours at the SAVOR craft beer festival? After missing out on the ten minute ticket sale, Mel and Ray had come up with an extra ticket that I’d jumped on. So, despite my hatred of math, I went through some numbers.

• The festival is 210 minutes long.
• The beers come in 2-ounce pours.
• There are 70 breweries, 2 beers each: 140 different beers.
• 100 beers is 71% of the beers present.
• 2-ounce pours x 100 = 200 ounces of beer, or 16.6 12-ounce cans of beer.

I would potentially be drinking 2/3 of a case of beer in 3.5 hours, or a can of beer every 12.6 minutes. While I think I could do that for a little while — a beer every 12 minutes doesn’t sound too outrageous — I knew if I tried to maintain that pace all night I’d either pass out, throw up, or black out and do something to get myself arrested. Or maybe all three. I knew ahead of time I would have to sip and dump; after all, all I’d ever required of my beer milestones were a sip, a taste, and quick idea of what the beer was.

We arrived inside the festival after standing outside in the DC heat for maybe half an hour; now I had worked up a physical thirst to drink a lot of beer to match my metaphorical thirst to drink a lot of beer. We got our complimentary SAVOR snifter glass for our beer, a little complementary wooden spork for the food, and — thankfully — a program that listed all the breweries and the beers they had on offer. I’m glad all I had to do was check off beers as we went rather than write them down; I knew the longer we were there, the more my writing would begin to resemble George Lucas dialogue**. As it happened, even my check marks began to look illegible as the night went on. Come back tomorrow for part II, where things really start getting interesting

* In Bluefield, West Virginia, you won’t even find Guinness on tap.  Killian’s is what you buy when you’ve got a few extra dollars. Forget seeing anything from even Magic Hat in a bar, let alone in the grocery store.  If you’re lucky there, you’ll get a crack at a Sam Adams’ seasonal every once in a while.
** Think crayon scribblings from a mentally challenged chimpanzee.

Brewfests, Craft Beer Comments Off