Microbrew Festival... do we drink too much? Don't answer that.

Yesterday, we went to the Columbus Microbrew Festival at the North Market. We got to sample all of the beers we wanted. It cost $15 to get a commemorative beer glass and ten beer tasting tickets. We highly recommend going because it's a great way to sample all kinds of beer for a fraction of what you'd pay at the bar, and since it's at the North Market, you have an amazing assortment of foods to choose from to eat along with those tasty microbrews.

Some friends of ours, Mike and Nate, decided to join us in going to the festival. What a great way to kick off the weekend on Saturday morning... but then again, we actually start off our weekends with our Friday night indulgence/guilty pleasure... 5 for 5 at Whole Foods (which is a wine and food sampling event). We arrived at the North Market shortly before noon, and the festival was scheduled to have its participating breweries tap into their beer and serve at noon. Good timing.

We got in line to purchase the wrist band, pint glass, and beer sampling tickets. By some stroke of the gods, I got an extra strip of 5 beer sampling tickets bringing my total to 15. I think somehow, through a 6th sense, the lady working the booth just knew that I really love my beer, and that she would be doing me an injustice if she hadn't slipped some extra beer tickets in there. In the end, I ended up sharing my extra tickets with Kate, Mike, and Nate anyway.

Some of the participating breweries were Columbus Brewing Company, Gordon Biersch, Barley's Brewing Company/Smokehouse and Brewpub, Elevator Brewing Company, Weasel Boy Brewing Company, and Hoster's. We made our way around to all of them and sampled a significant number of beers between us. We typically shared our samples so that we could all try as many of the beers as possible.

By the time we were down to our last tickets between us, we decided that we needed to try the only non-alcoholic item at the festival - the Hoster's Root Beer. This was, of course, Kate's favorite. What was funny about the root beer is that we wanted to taste the Hoster's Root Beer to see how it stacks up against Jones Soda, IBC, A&W, and Mug. Even funnier was the line we had to wait in to get root beer. They ran out of root beer while we were in line, but we weren't going to let that stop us. We waited for one of the Hoster's guys to return with a new mini keg of root beer, and it was worth it! When the Hoster's guy did return with the new keg of root beer, he realized that there was a ridiculously big line formed by people wanting to taste this root beer. Many of us shared a good laugh about how funny it was that we were at a microbrew festival where there were not typically lines of more than 3 or 4 at the most, but the root beer line was at least 25+. As it turns out, their root beer is top notch... up there in our books with IBC for top dog in the root beer world.

My favorite beers at the festival were the IPA's (no surprise if you know my taste in beers). For those of you who do not know, IPA stands for India Pale Ale. The one that really made my heart sing was the Barley's Hop Envy IPA, and the name is appropriate. It was a hoppy IPA that would make any other IPA envious of its hoppiness. Hoppiness is happiness.

Among the others that we sampled and really enjoyed include:
-Barley's Rasperry Wheat
-Barley's 5 Year Old Barley Wine
-Columbus Brewing Company's Apricot Ale
-Weasel Boy's Brown Stoat Stout (Mike's favorite)
-Gordon Biersch's Marzen

We followed up our microbrew festivities with a trip to Dingo and Adam's to watch the OSU v. USC football game. Neither of us care to talk about the game, but we did have a good time aside from the game itself. Look for my posts about the game in my blog (insert blog link here). They made jungle juice and had jello shots too. Let's just say that our fervor for drinking subsided, but we certainly ate ourselves silly. Dingo made some cheese and venison (deer meat) dip that was outstanding, and we picked up some lemon almond chicken salad from Giant Eagle that was surprisingly good. We finally called it a night around midnight, which ended 12 straight hours of food and alcohol consumption. What a great day!