Alefest Columbus

[drewm320]

A few of my friends and I made the road trip to Columbus for the first annual Alefest Columbus. This event has been in Dayton for 6-7 years now and the promoter is branching out to other cities now. We were expecting a similar crowd to the Alefest in Dayton (~3000) so we made sure to get there early, had all the must-have beers planned out, etc. We turned out to be the first people there.

Overall I think there were about 700-800 in attendance which was actually pretty nice. I don't think there were ever more that two people in front of me in a line the entire day. It also gave you plenty of time to bullshit with the brewery reps. The Dogfish Head guys were having all kinds of problems with their hops infuser. There was air in one of the hoses causing the beer to be churned up and pour nothing but head. We, being engineers and curious about these kind of things, hung around the table and pretty quickly figured out that they needed to have their chiller higher than the hops infuser to prevent the flow of beer from drawing in air from the infuser. Naturally, they ignored us and continued pouring crappy beers.

The other nice benefit of a small crowd was that they still had great beer at the end of the event. There were still bottles of Orval and Westmalle left at the end. The Unibroue guy had cases of unopened beer. Normally the Great Lakes table gets some of my business at these events. Not this time. Too many better beers with no line.

To top it off, one of the guys in our group knew a guy working there who was pretty tight with the owner of the event so we even got some free tickets. It was definitely a good time. We might have to make the trip to Cincinnati for Alefest in November.
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[ricka182]

Nice. Sounds like it was a good time. We have the Belgian Beer Festival in a couple weeks up here. I think this fest is a bit smaller than the rest, but still all Belgian/Belgian style, with direct brewery reps on site. Probably around 50+ beers or so maybe....should be a good time....
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