Had to take a blogging break for a few days to stop feeling like a high schooler who just discovered the internet, but now that I’m back, there are a few matters of business about the tourney and the blog.
First – I do intend to keep blogging here, both about future tournaments and beer in general. We kicked around ideas during the more sober moments of the tourney as to what we’d do next time. Obviously, there will be a Tournament of Wheats. There are simply too many absolutely lovely wheaty beers that are begging to be judged in convenient knockout form. Will it just be a cakewalk for Weihenstephaner, or will a domestic craft pull it out? It also stands to reason that we’d do a Tournament of Belgian-Style Ales. We could do one that was entirely actual Belgians and one that was a tourney of American Craft Belgian-Style beers and then pit the winners against each other. One of the more interesting ideas I heard was a “Tournament of Crap,” where we line up all the crap beers that are available at literally any bar in the US of A and pick out the best of the crap-heap so we know what to buy in a pinch. One nice advantage of such a tournament is that it will be cheap as hell to put together.
I alluded to a story in an earlier post about the shenanigans that my old roommate and I got up to earlier in the day, so:
David drove in from Maryland on the night prior to the tourney with the rest of the beer we needed to finish it all up. Naturally, when we got it all together we had to get a pretty picture of it all.
All told, we had about 1536 ounces of beer, which translates to 12 gallons of truly epic stouts. We got a fridge pic too, but it somehow looks less impressive from the point-of-view of my iPhone.
Since David lives in Maryland, he took the opportunity to pick up a few beers from the Total Wine up at Brier Creek that he can’t get up in MD (because MD, particularly Montgomery County, has idiotic beer laws), such as anything by Founders, our tournament champion. He naturally picked up 16 Breakfast Stouts for the trip home. While we were there, we happened to notice a vanity plate that was sufficiently odd for me to snap a shot (and I don’t usually take random pictures).
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for being proud of what you do for a living, but really? I mean, really? BNK TELR comin’ through, bitches! Oh yeah! You wish you could be me.
Since he was visiting Raleigh for the weekend, I felt obliged to take him out to the Bavarian Brathaus, a totally sweet German restaurant in Cary. He arrived Friday night and was leaving Sunday morning after the tournament, so we really could only do this on Saturday for lunch. If you have German food without beer, you’re doing it wrong. We had lunch at about 1:00 and the tournament got underway at 7:00, so we figured there would be no problem having a single good German beer at lunch and then going all out for the evening.
That was before we noticed a very interesting option on their beer draft list: you can have a small taster of all fourteen Bavarian Drafts for just $8. David and I like beer. Like, a whole lot. What were we supposed to do, not take advantage of an awesome opportunity to have fourteen one-and-a-half ounce tastes of excellent German beer just because we planned on having thirty-two more one-and-a-half-ounce tastes of much stronger beer that evening?
Clearly no.
That. Was. Awesome.
Also, in case it’s hard to see in the tiny iPhone resolution pics, the tasting glasses were little boots. My wife (our resident beer goddess) loved them.
We were surprisingly not drunk after all that, though Ashley drove us home just to be sure. It may have had something to do with the copious amounts of awesome Schnitzel I consumed with my beer shots.
So, just to recap, we had 46 1.5 oz beers that day, and 30 unique beers. That’s just under three pints each, which doesn’t sound particularly impressive until you recall that most of the beers we tasted that night were at or above 9% ABV, and the Germans were no slouch either.
Sometimes it’s hard for a day to get any more awesome.
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