Seattle International Beerfest

This weekend Liz and I were at the Seattle International Beerfest. In fact, we enjoyed the festivities from both sides of the table. On Friday we volunteered to pour, and on Saturday we came back to taste the beers.

On Friday, since I'm a bit over-anxious and we are always somewhat at the mercy of the bus schedules, we showed up early, and ended up pouring at Station 2. Our beers and those on both stations next to us were Spaten varieties. The four that Liz and I were mainly in charge of were:

• Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse
• Franziskaner Dunkel Hefe-Weisse
• Oktoberfest (Ur-Marzen)
• Spaten Premium Bock

And until I just wrote this I actually didn't know that the Oktoberfest and the Ur-Marzen were the same thing... I guess that gives you a bit of a clue as to how helpful we were to people who had questions, oh well. There really were surprisingly few brewery representatives if any, I never saw one. The effort was really driven by volunteers and event organizers, which was a bit of a different feel then the beerfest in Durham.

But pouring was fun, and despite my glib remark we pulled together some sort of description for the beers, between our past tasting of similar varietals and comments from people at the beerfest.

On the way home from the beerfest we even got to see some fireworks. One of the main shows was at Gas Works park, which is at the south end of a little peninsula pointing into Lake Union. Our bus coming home drives over a bridge that had a clear view out over Lake Union, and there was actually a really good view of the fireworks. It was really neat, in fact, as we were crossing the bridge we could actually see three shows. One out to the west, and two out to the east including the one at Gas Works.

On Saturday, we went back for the tasting. As volunteers we got free admittance and way to many beer tickets. There was really a good variety of beers, but both Liz and I have really stopped drinking since we moved out to Seattle. So although we wanted to try more the alcohol was getting the better of us and we had to call it quits.