This is a wonderful and very real fairy tale. Christmas is still months away, but it kind of comes early to Nashville every year. Once upon an October weekend there was a yearly affair run by Santa Hop God and his merry little band of helpers…
Our first present, thanks to Santa Hop God and his sometimes all too merry band of helpers was our guest speaker, John Palmer, who spoke Friday night about water chemistry and beer. How was it? Well, we definitely had some “chemistry” going between audience and speaker.
As they prepared dinner for us, a few rooms down, various clubs from all over set up multi-tap exhibits. Kind of like discovering a lot of beer in your stocking. This was one of my favorites…
(Shades of the Blues Brothers!)
Here’s how it all began…
Logging in entries: taking off labels and identifying entries.
Prejudging…
Dinner… wow. Enough for a herd of reindeer.
Here’s a single plate’s worth.
Then, after our speaker…
…a club crawl. Almost like a beer World’s Fair featuring homebrew clubs. This was before the room filled up…
Phil and Jodi Kane, you may remember my brewer profile a while back, did an Elvis exhibit. He even had dead Elvis outlined on the floor and a Dead on the Pot Stout.
Saturday morning, early: all those happy campers after a night of being beer celibate (Yeah, right); at 8:30: judging…
Local pub crawls go on in the afternoon as a few hardy souls, including moi’, do multiple flights: up to 4-5 flights of 10 or more each. Gets a little tough to judge once you get past Russian Imperials or Imperial IPAs. Oh, the things we must suffer (?!?) through for the sake of… beer! Then the award ceremony stretched on until past 11pm. For some reason the picture is blurry. Gee, I wonder why…
..and I thought beer was to me like spinach is to Popeye .
After the party ends Hop God, who organizes this event every year, takes these lonesome corny kegs home with the help of fellow members. For “corny” kegs they sure don’t seem to be laughing very much, do they?
And many of Santa Hop God’s helpers, and a few friends, went to Boscos for breakfast where they ate and drank happily ever after.
The End