A workout buddy of mine has been bugging me for the last four years to drive out to Sacramento this time of year for the beer festival… After holding him off for so long I finally buckled, I purchased tickets for D and I and we drove down to Sacramento, with a couple of friends, to check out the local beer festival.
We arrived a few minutes after the festival was open to the public and parking looked to be an issue but we were lucky as my office was a few blocks from the festival and there was plenty of parking there for us to use, so we avoided that headache. Only to find another one waiting for us. Despite covering two entire blocks the festival only had one entrance with two lines one for people who had prepaid and another for people buying their tickets at the event. We encountered the latter first and thought it was long, going down about half a block and moving at a pace I’d call somewhat south of glacial. The pre-paid line looked like it was almost as long, until we tried walking to the end of it. Walking and walking and walking. The prepaid line wrapped around an entire city block?! This is the line for people who had already paid too! What the hell?!
Falling prey to the sunken cost fallacy we waited in the line for the next twenty minutes to get in. Where else am I going to find 100+ brewers handing out their wares?
The plan was to hit up breweries we’d never heard of before, if we could handle that much booze, going back to places we’d heard of. I sampled brews from the following:
- Mad River Brewing
- Anchor Brewing
- Ol’ Republic Brewery
- Heretic Brewing
- Drake’s Brewing
- North Coast Brewery
- Crispin Ciders
- Shiner
- Knee Deep Brewing
- Hanger 24 Brewing
- Sacramento Republic FC
I should have been taking notes… But I didn’t. So, I really cant’ recall what I drank and what really stood out to me…. The only thing I can really remember is Knee Deep had a delicious vanilla bean Porter. I’d like to get my hands on that again at some point.
It was a fun experience, I’m glad I did it. Though I don’t think I’ll be doing it next year. I’m lucky in that Davis spoils us with two excellent grocery stores that have a large selection of craft brews and a beer shop. I don’t need to go out looking for excellent brew. And I can avoid the lines.
Interesting. The beer fests in Oregon never interested me much either, and for the same reason you gave: the same beers were readily available without traveling far.