Back when we were making plans to head to Wanaka for the wedding, we got to thinking about stopping over in another city and by a good stroke of luck we found that Beervana, a beer festival, was going on in Wellington the weekend before the wedding.
So we decided to go for it and after looking into it, we decided to volunteer for one session which would give us free admission to another session. So, Friday night we arrived for our volunteering session and got our assignments. Dustin was helping at the Portland seminar where they were pairing food with Portland brews. I was stationed at Liberty Brewing to serve the beer. It was a busy session and we both were exhausted by the end of the evening!
The event takes place at the stadium in Wellington so about half of the concourse was taken over with stalls of food and beer. I can't be bothered to look up numbers at the moment (c'mon, I'm on holiday!) but there must have been 30 to 40 breweries offering multiple brews. I think we managed to sample about 30 beers and most of the winners to us were stouts and porters with rich coffee and chocolate flavours. It might have been because it was cold out in Wellington! We had some unique ones that were also great - a lime and horopito (a peppery tasting leaf) gose beer which was the first gose beer I think I've had. I could certainly picture sipping that at a barbecue in the sun.
The food on offer was top notch too - this is a battered black sausage with feijoa sauce. If corn dogs were all like this I would be eating them more often!
Dustin was one of only about seven guys there without a beard.
Everything we tried at Yeastie Boys was awesome, we have to drink more of theirs. The latest beer Dustin bottled was based on one of theirs - he asked that I didn't mention that haha. Just in case some brewers are more secretive about their recipes and less keen for people to try to replicate them...
Just a couple of the evening's tasters.
Overall it was quite cool, it was interesting because it wasn't a boozefest where people were sloppy and drunk, sure people were tipsy but it wasn't silly and drunken the way the local Oktoberfest usually is. We learned that it's best not to wait for the last session as we ended up finding out that many beers run out by then so you don't get to taste them - such as the Bacon Ale that Epic made. Hopefully we'll be able to find a few in the stores.
We might go again next year, but we'll just have to wait and see.
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