On Saturday February 11th the Epic Hijinks crew* went to the Pizza Port Brewbies festival in Carlsbad. Overall it was a positive experience, but I am learning that I have some sort of mild agoraphobia and can't stand being in overly crowded places which made the festival an uncomfortable place for me to be.
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We rode the Coaster up from Old Town to Carlsbad instead of driving which was great as we could just relax and talk instead of being stuck in the car. We got to check out some great scenery and had a nice short walk over to Pizza Port from the station.
There were a lot of friendly people at the event, we ended up talking with a couple who were at the same table as us and passed around our glasses to share samples of the different beers. It was great to get beer recommendations and discuss tasting notes with them.
Great beer selection with quite a few special beers, including Pliny the Younger which I probably wouldn't have gotten to taste if it wasn't for this festival.
I was lucky enough to win a "goodie bag" in the raffle and got some cool swag from the Blair bars (Hamilton's, Eleven, Small Bar) along with other assorted stuff.
Inside the bottle shop there were free chocolates that were quite delicious, and Alecakes that were frosted to look like boobs.
Bad: as the festival got crowded I started feeling ill, but when I left and walked around the block I felt OK. Guess I just couldn't deal with the crowds - at times it felt like being in a polite mosh pit.
Since it was so hard to move around we missed out on the food which made me extra sad when I realized it was Nate from Toronado doing the cooking.
Motorboat was the ugliest beer I have ever drank, my pour was cloudy brownish-pink and looked like stomach bile. It tasted just fine, but I had to wrap my hand around the glass to avoid looking at the beer.
I had gone to the NCTD site to get Coaster times but there was no mention of the fact that they were having a special "Love Train" promotion for folks to ride 2 for 1 so we ended up all buying tickets for the train when we could've just bought two.
Coaster times sort of suck on Saturday, we had to leave Old Town before 10am to make sure we were at Pizza Port before noon. We ended up there about 11, so we had an hour wait to get into the festival - but then we turned it into a good thing by having pizza for lunch. We also didn't have a lot of choices for return times, we just lucked out that about the time we were ready to leave there was a train coming soon.
Pizza Port's bottle shop wasn't selling beer so we couldn't grab something to drink on our train ride back to San Diego - because being able to drink on the train is just too cool!
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*Epic Hijinks is the name of our drinking "guild" that currently has 3 members - me, Greg and Warren. We are actively recruiting more members as we could always use more fun people to go on drinking runs with us. We run DrinkAbout every third Wednesday of the month and generally start at Ritual Tavern and end at Toronado. We also regularly attend Friday Afternoon Club at Hess Brewing, and any Beer for Breakfast events at Small Bar. Oh, and keep the glass events - your cabinets will end up full of glassware if you raid with us.
