One down…Iowa City is next!
Last Saturday we had a great time at the Quad City Brew Ha Ha. The turnout was much more than expected! I was a little surprised at about 12:30 when I noticed a line of people to get into the fest… I had never seen that before! The next thing we knew, we were swamped with people. Person after person kept sampling the White ale. I would say, it was 5-6 White ale to any of our other beers. By 2:30pm, the John’s Generations White Ale was gone! We quickly moved the 20th Anniversary Dopplebock over to that tap handle.
Looking around, I saw that some other booths were out of beer. I was glad that I sampled some of the fine homebrew from Galesburg and Macomb, because they were pretty much gone by mid-afternoon. The Macomb Homebrewers had a fine Honey Ale that was made with Orange blossom honey and had orange peels in it… yum! They also had an experimental beer that was made with 50% Mountain Dew.. that was pretty unique and original. The MUGZ crew was really well organized.. they had 85 gallons of homebrew on hand! Very impressive. Eric Ware and Steve Slach really are doing a great job over there… congrats!
Bud had an impressive booth this year. It seems they are focusing more attention on Craft beer.. I think we can take that as a good sign, because their statistical trend watchers have been right many times before! Their booth had plenty of flashy stainless steel…
Check out their fancy tap boxes… they are pretty cool looking (and expensive!). Kind of a waste of a good keg though if you ask me.
Our 30 gallons was gone by 4:30 pm, next year we will have to bring more beer! In a way though we felt pretty good about it all!
Next week is the Iowa City Beerfest, behind Old Chicago in Coralville. Advance tickets are on sale now! I hope the turnout is as big as it was in Davenport. I think that Craft beer is really on a upswing, and this could be another sign of that.