The Great Arkansas Beer Festival: What a Time to be Alive

Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise. Proverbs 20:1

The editor was quick to call the day after the event, especially after the photographer called to inform him of how the festival had gone.

"I hear you might not write the article?"

"No," I respond "I'm definitely going to write the piece."

As usual, I didn't feel much like a "journalist" once the night ended for me and the clock began ticking on writing about the experience. With much alcohol clouding my judgement, I had decided I was a lousy writer, an angry person, and just useless all around. I know now that this is not the case, but at the time it seemed right. You see, alcohol can sometimes cause introspectiveness and that is precisely what happened at The Great Arkansas Beer Festival.

First, lets back track to the day of the actual festival, July 22, 2017. I woke up, took care of the various animals, and assisted my wife with getting Henry, the poodle, ready to go to work with her. Once she left, I started cleaning up the house. I was super excited to be able to cover The Great Arkansas Beer Festival. Not only was I going to be getting free premium beer and premium people watching, but it was happening on my first professional assignment for a blog with a few thousand hits. The excitement of the day along with keeping myself busy made the hours fly until noon hit. Once it did, it was time to start getting serious.

I had a bottle of Basil Hayden's bourbon that I had been working on for quite some time, and today seemed like the perfect occasion to go ahead and finish it off. Once the clock struck twelve and the majority of the cleaning had been finished, it was time to rock and roll. I go into the bottom cabinet of my island with a pullout shelf well stocked with liquor of all kinds and pluck out the bourbon. I put a couple of ice cubes in my glass, and pour a couple of fingers. The first sip of a good bourbon is always nice; it's warm, sweet, and smooth.

Most decent people are well aware of the joys of drinking a nice beer in the shower, but if you haven't tried it yet, you should bring along a nice bourbon or scotch next time you're feeling frisky enough to do some shower drinking. This particular round of drinking started well, but once out of the shower, dressed, and on to my second glass of Basil Hayden's the mild nervousness of having no idea what I was going to write about was becoming very real. I had taken this assignment on at the last possible moment with no actual plan. Just going to the festival and reviewing beers was never going to happen. It had been done many times before, I am by no means a connoisseur, and that just seemed boring more than anything else.

By the time my photographer/designated driver arrived, I had accomplished catching a nice buzz, and had realized that I would be flying by the seat of my pants on this assignment. With this being both mine, and the cameraman's first professional writing gig at an a major event, his confidence was not supreme when I confided in him my lack of direction for this whole thing. We jump in the car, and let the Beastie Boys blast as we head toward downtown Little Rock where the convention center would be holding the event.

We left the house fairly early and as expected, we arrived with around an hour before the doors opened for the VIP pass holders, and us. There was only one obvious thing to do in this situation; go to a bar. As we walked around downtown ignoring panhandlers, and dodging street performers, we look for where we should go grab a brew.

"Well," said Sam, "we can't go to the Rev Room."

"Why not?"

"I got pretty rowdy in there with a group of friends before I went to prison and skipped out on a pretty big tab." he replies.

"Yeah," I say "we should probably avoid getting arrested before we even get inside the event. How about Big Whiskey's?"

Being right across the street made this an easy decision, so we cross the street and place ourselves at the bar. I order a pint of Working Glass Hero from Rebel Kettle, and my cameraman decides to fuck up the day by getting a man can of Pabst.

The guy seated next to us at the bar was nice enough to take a picture of us once he noticed the cameraman taking pictures of me and the bar. After the pictures were taken, I start chatting the guy up about the beer festival to see if he were going to be a fellow event goer. It turned out that the guy had been debating whether or not to get a pass, but he hadn't quite decided yet. He certainly seemed to enjoy drinking local beer, and he had been to quite a few of the local breweries in the central Arkansas area. I informed him that Sam and I were going to be at the festival on behalf of this fine blog and that he should check out the blog, which he did. Once we had finished our drinks and the time had come to go into the festival, we did the right thing, acted as though we both had to go to the restroom, and promptly left the bar.

We make our way into the convention center, and down the stairs where we are immediately greeted by a spectacular mural of one of Arkansas' greatest productions, William Jefferson Clinton.

We continue to follow the signs pointing the way toward the convention rooms which will be hosting The Great Arkansas Beer Festival until we finally reach the check in table. As we approach the guy who allows entry into the event, I see one of the guys who works for the production company which was running the event. He recognized me from when I went to get our passes for the event and even remembered the name of the blog, which I wasn't sure was a good or bad thing at that moment in time. He wished us well, welcomed us in, showed us the table where we'd get our glasses, and with that the shindig was officially on.

The VIP crowd was pretty small, but they were very lively and some of them were clearly professional drinkers. Things got weird from the get-go as when we first began making our way toward the booths, a group of girls walked by with a goat in tow. They headed toward the stage where 103.7 The Buzz was set up and broadcasting live. Sam decided to follow the group in order to get pictures of the group and goat.

I was so excited, I couldn't decide where to begin as I made my way around the festival. I spotted where the goat came from once I got to the back corner of the room. They not only had a nice open area set up for corn hole (bag toss), and some other fun games to play while you consume your brews, but there was an entire petting zoo as well. I don't believe I've ever gotten drunk, and had an overwhelming urge to pet barnyard animals, but to each their own I suppose.

I still hadn't decided on what it was I would be looking for at the festival, but I had dressed the part of the kind of goober I had expected to interact with. I had on a shirt which looked cheap, but in all reality was actually more expensive than a button down, Caribbean themed shirt has any right to be. My shorts were a pastel blue, and my flip flops had some wild color in them to accentuate the feet. Top it off with long hair, a beard, and sunglasses on a lanyard, and I should have been able to blend well into this environment in order to find something worth writing about.

After making my way around the grounds once in order to check out what was offered, and getting a good lay of the land for once my motor functions began to deteriorate. I decided quickly that I would start off at the absolute bottom of the barrel with beers that I absolutely had to try. I made my way over to the booth with cardboard cutout of Larry the Cable Guy.

The beer was Git-R-Done Cream Ale, but this thing was not good. I found very little sweetness in this beer. It just seemed like a shitty, blonde ale with very few redeeming qualities. The head was thin, and dissipated quickly, it didn't seem particularly well carbonated, and it reminded of the leftover beer you find the morning after a solid party in a solo cup someone set down and forgot about. I would rather sit and drink Bud any day than that beer.

I asked the poor girl what she had done to be stuck at this booth and not with the rest of the team at the Carsons booth next to her.

"I'm just a volunteer." she replied.

What poor luck. If she had been at the inbev booth, she could have at least sucked down the relatively high ABV Lime-A-Ritas until she could have gotten drunk.

"Hopefully the guys from Carsons brewery will be nice enough to allow the girl to consume the beer they had available at their booth." I thought.

As I made my way around the floor sampling various beers and chatting up the crowd, and booth workers I became a little disappointed with the crowd. There were a few interesting characters, but no one had jumped out and stolen the show yet. The VIP crowd was obviously enjoying themselves, and the beer; however, and this was giving me a great opportunity to drink heavily and sample as many beers as possible without having to wait in line forever. There were even some VIP specific beers available to try. None of them just absolutely blew me away, but they were all very nice brews, and most of them were things you don't find at the liquor store often, so they were very welcome overall.

Everyone seemed to be having a great time, and aside from a few backhanded "fake news" comments when people would see the press pass, nothing very story worthy was unfolding yet. I made my way over to the Samuel Adams booth in order to try and score some free shit, but once I actually got there, it was mostly gone. I drank their beers, all of which I'd had before, and complained of them having the nerve to not have a single bottle of Utopias available for the VIP crowd. Again, the ladies at the booth announced that they were just volunteers, but they should have walked away once they showed up and saw the limited number of glasses to give away, and not a drop of Utopias in sight.

Again, I made my way a few booths down sampling as I went. During this journey is when I came upon my favorite beer of the day brewed by Damgoode Brews, called Ready, Set, Gose. The beer was a saltwater sour, and a super interesting drink. The brewers actually use sea salt during the brewing process and it really comes out in a spectacular way. It reminded me of being on the ocean, which is one of my favorite places in the world. It wasn't quite like having a mouthful of saltwater, but the salt was forward enough that there was no ignoring it. This was a beer I could see myself ordering a few pints of and not even coming close to tiring. I heaped praise upon the guys at the booth, one of which was a brewer, and promised them they would get a good mention in this post. If you're reading this go get a pint, pitcher, or growler of the Ready, Set, Gose; do yourself a favor and get it now.

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After leaving the Damgoode booth, I removed my phone from my pocket in order to pause recording for a bit and create a natural break between the VIP time and general admission, because that time was finally upon us. To my horror, however, the recording app I was using on my phone had gotten nothing since the beginning of the event. Either the app had malfunctioned, or the microphone itself, but either way, I knew I had potentially lost some vital information as I was beginning to become substantially inebriated. I played around with the microphone as much as possible in order to try and ensure that it wouldn't come unplugged. Then, I prayed.

Finally, the time had come to let in the mad, drooling masses. The wave of people broke upon the room in a great, loud, drunken way. The VIP guests at this point were good and lubricated, and there were clearly more than a few in the crowd of beer drinkers pouring in who had the common sense to pregame before the festival so as not to come into this thing stone sober. As I stood in line waiting to sample some of the goods from a brewery in Hot Springs, a group of guys behind me seemed to be relieved that they were not the only ones who were visibly drunk with the doors to the festival having only just opened to the general pass holders. I informed them that I had been drinking seriously since around noon.

After a deal of wandering around the place trying to decide upon which booths I wanted to wait in line for to taste different beers, I thought I would swing by the Ballast Point booth. The line wasn't too bad, and I hadn't had one of their beers since living in San Diego. Once I had my fill of what they offered, I decided to hit a shorter line not quite knowing which booth it was.

Once I reached the front though, I realized I had stumbled upon the booth for the gluten free beers, which was basically all ciders. I approached the Philadelphia "Phil" Collins cosplayer pouring out the beer and was greeted with another fake news comment. I informed the man that there was no fake news coming from any Guilty Addictions desk, and that we take our drugs and alcohol very seriously!

"There aren't nearly enough serious reviewers of hardcore drugs any longer, but the brave journalists at Guilty Addictions are looking to change that." I said "Congratulations on starting your gluten free diet too, I hope it's not too late."

The guy stared at me in bewilderment as I began to walk away from the booth. He eventually went back to serving the cider in a state of confusion as I made my way to the edge of the precipice that was Rock Town Distillery's booth. Once I threw back my shot of bourbon, I had gone past the point of no return, or at least that's what the cameraman says. I still hadn't found any semblance of a story, and I was well warmed up at this point. I decided I had to go and find this story if it wasn't going to come to me.

As I surfed from booth to booth asking any who would listen what their thoughts were on the event, I came across a black couple who I thought could give me a different perspective from all of the honkeys I had been speaking to up until this point. I approached them and introduced myself explaining that I write for a blog, and that I was at the festival covering the event. I clumsily tried to get the perspective of someone of color about an event attended mostly be white dudes, consuming beer brewed mostly by a bunch of crackers. It's difficult to recollect at this point, but I'm fairly positive I just seemed like some privileged, clueless, white guy, asking stupid questions, and speaking differently to them solely because they were black.

The two suffered through my poor attempt at gaining a different perspective better than I'm sure I would have if I had been in their shoes. They could not have been nicer, and even thanked me for taking the time to interview them. We parted ways and I wandered off to get another beer feeling very much like an asshole at that point. Maybe I put more into the situation than what actually need be, but I'm not sure. As I drunkenly walked the floor of the convention center, I also became painfully aware of the other journalists, and reporters in the event at this point. They were well dressed, had professional equipment, weren't drinking their assignment away, and probably had a degree relating to journalism, English, mass communication, or something similar. I had to get the fuck out of there.

I informed Sam that I was ready to leave, as I thought I had finally found what I had been searching for. I found that I was an angry, insecure drunk. I realized that I was certainly not a journalist and had no business being assigned to cover the opening of a can of Natural Light, let alone The Great Arkansas Beer festival. I was depressed and disappointed in myself for not being able to find anything worth writing about, for being an insensitive ass, for not being a better writer, and allowing myself to be put into a sour mood when I had spent a beautiful day drinking free beer with great people.

Sam assured me on the way home that I was a perfectly fine writer, and that I would absolutely think of a story to come out of this situation. I vehemently disagreed with him and informed him that I wouldn't be writing the piece. Of course this made its way to the ears of the editors; but, by the next day I had regained my resolve and decided that I would have the post written by the deadline.

The next few weeks consisted of me realizing that the recordings on the phone were hours of nothing. There wasn't even any noise, it was just silence. I looked through the pictures taken realizing that the pictures weren't of professional quality, but I fully expected that. I tried to no end to make a story out the events of the day, while receiving emails from the production company wondering when the post would be up. I had finally assured myself that what I wrote would be okay, although I was having one hell of a time writing.

So, in the end, this is the result. What was the story? The day and the events within it. It is whatever the loyal readers decide it is. Is it good? Am I good? I'll leave that up to the editors, readers, and whatever supernatural entity keeps this rock spinning. Hopefully it's deemed good enough to get me some more access to other festivals, political events, and maybe even backstage to some decent concerts. Until next post, cheers.