The American Craft Beer Fest

Happy Friday everyone! Hope you all had a great week - mine was a bit nutty and very fun packed including a company trip to Six Flags New England followed immediately by a 6 AM flight out of Logan Airport - but I can now say I'm safely in California and looking forward to the next couple of VERY relaxing weeks.

For today's post I wanted to share with you one of the coolest date nights I've ever been on. Last Friday my beau and I went to go to the American Craft Beer Fest at the Boston Seaport World Trade Center. Needless to say - it was beyond awesome.

We had bought tickets nearly 4 weeks in advance and I had been on the edge of my seat waiting for it to arrive ever since. I mean what could possibly be more exciting - a giant room of craft beer for me to taste with my main squeeze! To say the Festival met my expectations is an understatement. It was Incredible.

The American Craft Beer Festival is the largest in the country - there were over 160 breweries from around the US represented and upwards of 600 beers available for tasting. SO EPIC.

We were there virtually as the doors opened at 6 PM and didn't waste any time - we decided off the bat that we didn't have much of an agenda in things we HAD to try but instead looked for booths with the shortest lines - not hard to find considering how many booths there were. This led us to try some great new places we had never heard of before and turned us on to some awesome new beers. We were also able to talk with a lot of the reps and brewers that way and hear some awesome stories about the beers we were drinking.

We probably got to about 25 booths and attempted to try about two beers between the two of us at each booth. Some breweries we tried included: Brewmaster Jack, Founders Brewing Company, Green Flash Brewing Co., Mayflower Brewing Co., Newburyport Brewing Company, and many, many others. Honestly, each one was totally awesome.

More info about my favorite beers and the overall experience after the jump!

A couple of stand out favorite beers:
*Ommegang's Hennepin
and
*Port.ico's FuzyLogic (full discloser - I happen to know the two guys who started this brewery prior to this event - but it was still, no bias, one of my favorite beers at the festival)

It was interesting to see how many breweries were producing extremely hoppy beers i.e IPA's, knowing this type of beer is extremely popular these days I was still surprised to see that virtually every brewery had at least one IPA offering. And while I love me some IPA I will say I was on the look out for something a little maltier and sweeter and was disappointed in what I was (or rather wasn't) able to find (granted we didn't even make it to half of the stands - this event was hard work).

Another highlight of the Festival was knowing a couple of people in the industry who were there working, allowing us to stop by every once and a while and relax & hang out with friends when the act of repetitively drinking beer after beer got a little overwhelming and we stopped being able to differentiate flavors.

All in all I thought it was an awesome experience and a very well executed event and I can't wait to go back next year! Hope to see some of you there as well!

Have a great weekend! See you Monday

xo 

Megan