Just Something I Like Talking About

My favorite tradition is going to the Great American Beer Festival. This started as an excuse for a bunch of my college wrestling buddies to get together after we moved to different corners of the country, but over the course of nearly a decade it has turned into the only time of year I blindly have faith in to be one of the best times of the year. Every year, something unexpected and spectacular has happened.

On the surface, the Great American Beer Festival is the largest craft beer festival in North America. This year, there were eight hundred breweries and nearly four thousand beers. Every year it gets bigger.

Beneath the surface, the Great American Beer Festival is the only magic I believe in. I’ve been going with a core group that has only missed a festival due to a birth or a death.

One year we dressed up like 80s rock stars and had our pictures taken for newspapers and TV.

One year, my friend passed away about a month before the festival — he already bought his ticket. That year we ran into Zane Lamprey. He hosted a late night show, Three Sheets, that we used to watch in college. It wasn’t it big part of our lives, but it made enough of an impression that we recognized who he was. We all got our pictures taken; and afterwards, a few beers in and dressed like a cowboy, I told Zane about my friend.

One year the Airport started hosting a beer tasting called ‘Beer Flights’ right in the main terminal.

One year I had a deep heart to heart with my friend about life and death. He asked me to promise that I would take his oldest son to the festival if something happened to him before he turned 21.

One year Oktoberfest was running the same weekend. We cancelled our dinner reservations at one of the nicest and oldest restaurants in town to eat camel burgers and watch keg bowling. There really were camel burgers, there was every meat under the sun.

This past year, my flight in went right past a thunderstorm, the streets were flooded with zombies and I left town with a 2x4 autographed by “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan.

Maybe the fact that I’m expecting great things to happen makes me more open to finding them, I’m not willing to rule that out. Yet it’s not just me. There is a reason we keep going back. We could meet up anywhere and it might even be fun to shake things up for the sake of variety. But wherever we went instead wouldn’t have the guarantee. When we go to the Great American Beer Festival, something unexpected and spectacular happens.

If you like beer, it should go without saying that I give this my strongest recommendation.

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