GABF 2011 – Day 3 Fallout With Pics
The Great American Beer Festival adventures of Jonny and Danny Fullpint continue, as they drink their way through Denver on their last day.
Read on for unique perspective of both sessions of GABF as well as some amazing pictures. Cheers!
Saturday Members Only Session / Winners Ceremony
After a few late nights in a row, we entered the festival much slower than Thursday evening. There was quite a crowd, but nothing like Friday nights insanity. After doing a few laps around the floors just to see what was left and chat with some folks, we made our way to the Award Ceremony. Luckily Jonny got a great spot for pictures, and I got a good spot up in the front of the audience. On a whim, I decided to “live blog” medal announcements over at our Twitter page. The big problem with that was the clobbered AT&T 3G reception. In the age of Untappd, Facebook, Twitter, MMS and SMS, data was not moving and batteries were-a-draining. Luckily I figured a work around with the Twitter app to lessen my own data load, and did the best I could with my soon to be lifeless iPhone. By the time they were at category 50, my hands were locking up!
I’m not sure how everyone else feels as a craft beer fan at a ceremony like this, but I felt like a fan rooting for his team at that moment in time. We aim to deliver perspectives from every craft brewing region without bias. With that said, I could help but root for Firestone Walker, TAPS Fish House, The Bruery, Alesmith and the plaid pants wearing Pizza Port gang. I was lucky enough to sit next to Denise Jones and Brendan Moylan of Moylan’s Brewery, and while Tweeting like a mad man, I had small side bars with legit craft beer experts. Pretty surreal. 2 hours and 99% of my battery later, the place had a happy vibe in the air, coming from the hard working craft breweries that came up with the bronze, silver or gold. I was happy seeing them so happy. No doubt, this is one of the more positive aspects of this industry.
Saturday Evening Final Session
We wrapped up the evening with Bobby and his friend Chris from Graphics 22/TheHopMan looking for sours. The problem was most of the sours were so popular, and thus gone by the last session. With all we’ve sampled over the weekend, it was really not a big deal what I was trying at that point. I perceived the crowd as much smaller than the last two sessions, but the enthusiasm was still there. We thought it would be a good idea to bail out early and eat some food. That was one thing we lost focus on was eating at regular intervals. We went out, had some steaks and called it an evening.
Continued SHOUTOUTS
Big shout out to BA Spencer, Sandra Evans of Full Sail, Joel from New Holland, Joey and Wayne at Cigar City, Chris at Weyerbacher, Dave W., Andrew Bell, Alex P. Davis, Verdugo Brandon, Mom and G, Sage at Lost Abbey, Those Roller Derby skanks from night 1 (yup I said it so you didn’t have to), Beachwood Gabe, Lena and Julian, Deschutes Adam, Stone Jacob, Supa-man Jace, Stan Lee and our boys at WestCoasterSD. Cheers!
