We were very busy bees yesterday! First we attended MomoCon down at Ga Tech. It’s an anime con with lots of kids. Unless you’re anime specific, you’ll probably not want to vend here. It’s a fun little con – hard to find, but free parking and a decent venue. The rooms are small and vendors/artists are all over the place. If you attend, make sure to go into EVERY room. There were probably 6 or more small rooms with vendors that we ran across in addition to the Dealers Room – which was inaccessible for some unknown reason. But hey, for a FREE con, it’s absolutely worth going to. EVERYONE was in costume. [NOTE: MomoCon has grown up! Now it is a huge con that takes place at GWCC and WE do the vintage arcade there! You should DEFINITELY come to this con!! -A 2017]
Then we headed to midtown for the Brew Your Cask Off event at Sweetwater Brewery. It was the first year for this unique event. Sweetwater had various vendors and retailers of their products create a cask brew for the event. What that means is that the brewmasters pick a flavour of Sweetwater as a base then add flavourings to it. The keg is then sealed up and allowed to sit for a short time (a few weeks, I think). This flavours the beer and can even change the nature of the beer they started with.
We give it a 3.5 out of 5 overall, which is pretty darn good for a first year event!
The Bad
All the beer was warm. Blech.
Most of the beer was flat. Blech.
[For those of you who think this is normal for cask beer, um, NO, it is NOT: “Some people have the notion that real ale is naturally “warm and flat”. This is incorrect, a cask ale is ideally served between 54-56F degrees – cool, but not chilled like keg beers – and should have a noticeable natural carbonation from the secondary fermentation in the cask. Look for the little bubbles which swirl around when you agitate your pint.” from Cask Ale UK. All the beer was around 65-70F and most was completely FLAT.]
Volunteers did not know what they were pouring.
Too few Portopotties.
Sketchy parking unless you come an hour early. (We did! Yay!)
No room for notes in the programme.
No one knew what the tickets were for!
The Good
There were some standout beers for sure. Even when served warm!
The crowd was a good size for the venue. Glad they did not oversell it.
The food vendors were very good. Mellow Mushroom brought OVENS!!
Good all ’round vibe for the event.
We will definitely attend this event again!
WINNERS:
1st Fontaines Hop n Spicy <- We liked this one!
2nd Gibneys ELT ale
3rd Taco Mac PNS Reserve
4th Locos Moose Brew <- I loved this one!
Peoples Champ
Cypress Street Knobzilla Vanilla Oatmeal Stout <- DEEEELISH! We totally <3 this one!
We hope that Sweetwater will make this an annual event. It is great to try weird brews! We liked it more than the Decatur Beer Festival, actually. Good job to the brewery and all the brewmasters! We voted for our buddies at The Porter. They did a good job with their It’s Nuts in Here IPA. Very tasty! We hope you’ll win it next year!
Shout out to our beer drinkin’ buddies: Heather, Charles, Lissa and JJ! GREAT to hang out with you! <3
Fun weekend! We enjoyed the perfect weather yesterday so much that we don’t even mind the rain today! :-)
FYI – Cask ales nearly always taste flat. In fact, I don’t think I’ve EVER had a cask ale that didn’t taste flat.
But anyway.
We really had a lot of fun last night! Hooray!
Yah, I’ve had a few cask ales before and yes, while they are on the flat side, these were really flat to the point of tasting stale. Maybe it was more about how warm they were. Most of them were nasty. I’m really glad the Oatmeal Stout we all liked won! Yay!