Signs and tokens. A good system.
I’m not a beer girl. I really don’t enjoy hoppy beers. So Cask Days is an usual event for me to even consider attending. But I heard that Guy Rawlings (Bellwoods Brewery) was curating the food vendors and I’d also recently discovered that I actually enjoyed drinking Amsterdam’s Boneshaker – one of the hoppiest of them all. So when the opportunity came up to attend, I thought I’d give things a shot. Here are some visuals and notes!
Oh beer! How I only like some of you.
Funnel Cake (Bellwoods Brewery) with Bellwoods Brewery malt & centennial hops syrup. Yum
Cured meat plate with Thuet bread (Hogtown Charcuterie). They also had black oak braised sauerkraut & confit pork shoulder on a bun and pickled herring on pumpernickel! So sad I didn’t get to have the herring.
Robbie Hojilla’s soy-glazed pork & fermented vegetable sandwich. Tasty, though the vegetable wasn’t as fermenty as I thought it would be. Closer to pickled. Good sandwich. Enjoyed the banana ketchup!
Jay Carter’s salt-baked pretzel served with alsatian mustard. Chewy and warm and wouldn’t you know I’d been craving a soft pretzel all week!! Awesome.
Art along one of the walls. I also really was tickled by the X-Men art there.
Cask Days, even for a non-beer drinker, was an enjoyable event. Things seemed well-organized; good signage everywhere, token system was effective, and there was a good breadth of nibbles. To be able to try a lot of beers from across the country was a fun opportunity. And even though I didn’t love most of the beer I had, I did like some of them. If you’re remotely interested in beer, this was the event to hit. Pro-tip: hit session 1 if you can. Later sessions saw many beers become unavailable.
October 30, 2012 at 1:04 pm
I saw Cask Days pop up on my twitter feed, but wasn’t sure about making the trek down. Sounds like I missed some interesting food, especially the hoppy funnelcake!
So I know tickets to the event was $35, which includes 4 x $2.50 drink tokens. Were there additional fees for food? Were vendors giving out drink samples as well?
October 30, 2012 at 1:22 pm
There wasn’t a whole ton of food – 6 stations total: Chocosol, Grand Electric, Jay Carter, Hogtown Charcuterie, Guy Rawlings, Robbie Hojilla and Chris Kalisperas – but almost all good. Everything was token-based, even food. So most items were 2 tokens ($5). I didn’t see any free samples being given out – either food-based or drink-based.
I hear sessions 1 and 2 were sold out at 1000 people per session! Lots of people, and while busy, didn’t feel too crazy. I did go at 2:30 though, so not right at opening. I really liked the funnel cake – though.. fried dough and malty syrupy goodness? Hard for me not to like it!!