Portland International Beer Festival and Burger Week

It's been two weeks.  I know.  I gotta get better at posting more often.  I gotta get more interesting too.

Most Portland outsiders don't know much about Portland.  But one thing they do know, fairly quickly, is that craft beer is THE scene.  Budweiser products?  Pfft.  That's like 17th on the draft list.  In fact, if you're going to order a Bud product go sit in timeout and think about your life choices.  There are more breweries her per capita than anywhere else in the country, and from my experience every bar is a craft beer bar.  Accordingly, there tends to be a drinking festival every other weekend.  At least it seems that way.  This time of year, when the weather stays a bit drier, there are some big kahunas to speak of.  I missed the Wimbledon of beer festivals this summer since we were in Michigan last month.  So to make up for it we went to the U.S. Open of beer festivals last weekend: the Portland International Beer Festival (if it's international, why it would it be the U.S. Open? Anyway).

My first beer festival experience was wonderful.  Apparently they moved from a much smaller location to Holladay Park, a lovely open patch with which to fill plenty of beer stands.  My sister dropped me, Janae, and my brother-in-law off about three hours after it began.  We were fully expecting a sardine/cattle situation with lines longer than bathroom one Garth stood in in Wayne's World.  What we received was the most pleasant of surprises.

This was the basic beer set up.

There is no way to know if we hit a sweet spot of time where there was just more room to operate and people had come and gone, but it was beautiful.  We didn't have to wait more than two minutes for any beer that we wanted.  There was space to stand and enjoy our 4oz. samples.  It was glorious.  We received 10 drink tickets with our entry fee.  Each beer was "priced" with different ticket values.  Needless to say, you run out of 10 tickets pretty quick.  So we re-upped for 15 more tickets apiece at $1 a ticket.  We made even more rounds.  We didn't get a guide.  We just picked and chose which ones sounded like good ones to try.  And we avoided 4-ticket beers because duh, you want your tickets to last longer.  We ended up leaving there after two and a half hours because otherwise we would have burned through more cash quicker than The Joker in Dark Knight. 

It was awesome though.  Had I had more money perhaps we would have stayed longer.  I don't know though because we got a fairly drunk even though they were serving 4oz. samples.  Not eating before you go helps.  No worries though because they had great food options, including a glorious brat stand where I ordered a double bacon cheddar brought that tasted like serenity.

Other cool things going on:  a fountain in the middle of the park (it's always there, but it was cool), live music, cigar stand, and a puppy kissing booth.  That was the kicker.  The puppy kissing booth.  It gives people (read: women) who don't really care that much about trying beers something else to do.  For $3 you can spend unlimited amounts of time with a pack of pups.  Janae dove right in.  Dylan and I walked around to get more beer.  We checked back in.  We got more beer.  It was such a unique feature at a drinking festival.  I though it was a great addition.  Everyone gets to be happy.  I mean they are puppies.  C'mon, who doesn't love a puppy?

It was a great cherry-popper for me in terms of beer fests.  There will be many, many more.  Unfortunately, these types of things require money, so one must be judicious with drinking plans.  I will do my best to attend them all anyway.  Because BEER.  I look forward to the upcoming fall fests that are sure to stir up warm fuzzy feelings as my palette is awash in spiced hops and yeast.

All I wanted to say about Burger Week here is that it's not sweet.  Let me clarify.  Burger joints here are sweet.  I've had unbelievable burgers here.  But Burger Week is not the same.  A limited list of restaurants offer one - count 'em one - $5 burger during the duration of the promo.  However, in our attempt to ingest these delightful hunks of beef, we discovered that most places sell out of the special.  How does that work?  Do you run out of beef?  As a burger joint?  I feel like that doesn't make sense.  Something is amiss.  Restaurant Week back in the D.C. area offered you some lunch and dinner options at a limited cost.  It was totally worth it.  I never heard of any restaurants running out of the products they were jocking.  It shouldn't happen.  Here, it does.  The silver lining is that we got two dinners at Chipotle for $1.05 after using a giftcard.  Take that, Burger Week.  For the record I will pay full price for all the burgers listed on the specialty menu.  They are totally worth it.

Tomorrow we will be going to mom's house to console her after the loss of her beloved dog, Laura.  It totally sucks and everyone wishes they didn't have to go through it.  But that's life.  She'll be okay.  It just stings when your companion leaves prematurely.  Until next time, blogosphere.