The Festival that is Brewski

It’s over, and I feel like a kid on December 26th. I’m already looking towards next year, and the chance to relive the joy, the anticipation, the laughter, the food,…the beer. The glorious, glorious beer.

I arrived around 3:45 pm, with a 30-pack of Miller Lite in hand. While I was waiting for the doors of the packed lobby elevator to close, T.C.’s sister and her boyfriend appeared. I said, “Don’t let them on, they’re trouble.” They laughed as the doors closed, and a guy standing next to me said, “I’m not going to argue with a guy holding a case of Miller Lite.”

Rocky (my friend who I was splitting the hotel room with) and I got settled in, and then I had to run a parking voucher out to my car. Rocky had brought a cooler, but he left it in T.C.'s car; I tasked him, therefore, with retrieving and filling it with ice and cans from the 30-pack while I was out. [In the parking lot, I ran into Shan and her girl Alex, who each were carrying enough luggage for a two week furlough.] When I got to the room (with Toe and LRG, who I had collected along the way back from the parking lot), I was greeted by Rocky’s rare display of ingenuity: too lethargic to walk out to the car to get his cooler, he realized that the small waste bin was laced with a fresh garbage bag—so he filled it with ice and beer. It has been said that necessity breeds invention; for the beer drinker, though, it’s often laziness that does it.

Armed with our trash can cooler, we joined several others in some pregaming while watching the NFL draft in LRG and Toe’s room. Nick showed up with a cooler (a real one) filled with bottles of Sam Adams, Michelob, Miller Lite, Yuengling, and Guinness Stout. His cousin, Sean, brought bottles of Jameson and Bailey’s, which meant there were going to be some Irish Car Bomb attacks. Add LRG and Toe’s handle of Captain Mo’ to the equation, and you have a formula for a black out. Or, as we W&J alums like to call it, “a Saturday afternoon.”

The event, on a whole, was fantastic. A lot of good beers (Sam Adams Boston Lager, Labatt Honey, New Castle Brown Ale, Atwater Vanilla Java Porter, Franziskaner Heffe, and Pilsner Urquell were favorites), a lot of great food, and a lot of cute booth girls—Hi L-…wait, I never did get her name; “tall blonde wearing the tight white t-shirt”? Several of the girls in our 21-member army, including Shannon and Dr. Kelly, made the mistake of skipping dinner and going straight into the beer hall. How did they make this mistake, you might ask? They simply got into the wrong line. Apparently, the line leading to the two large banquet tables covered in food seemed less like the dinner line than the one leading towards the stairs. I forget sometimes that my friends, despite being cultured graduates of an academically-renowned college, are still, at their core, blondes.

Nick managed to taste each of the 67 brews, and he drug Sean—a rookie—along for it. Halfway through Sean had a look on his face similar to that of a female lead in a horror flick who has just realized that someone drugged her drink. Eyes half-open and glazed, he swayed slightly, and seemed to be trying to mouth the word “No.” But there was no help coming. Nick was in his happy drunk mode, which is comparable to a small child’s demeanor at Disneyland.

After Brewski Fest ended at 11 p.m., we headed over to the Matterhorn, a large bar in the resort, where we continued the assault on our livers. Eventually someone bought a round of Jager Bombs, and that was the one that sunk me. My memory begins slowly fading from that point on, until total blackness at around midnight. I jolted awake around 6:30 a.m., lying facedown, fully-clothed, on top of my bedcovers. Apparently, I had a text message convo with Dr. Kelly somewhere after midnight about pizza and its importance in the grand scheme of things; amazingly, she was the one speaking in defense of pizza.

At breakfast the next morning, one of the first questions tossed across the table by one of our disheveled, groggy crew was, “When do tickets go on sale for next year’s Brewski Fest?”

Not soon enough.