Vibe Check: Saratoga Beer Summit
Beer lovers came from far and wide for three hours of all-you-can-drink craft beverages at the City Center's annual event.
For a crowd of people that seemed to be having a great time, the beer day-drinkers at the Saratoga Beer Summit sure had a lot of complaining to do.
“I’m not happy with the size of the cup,” said one woman who would’ve surely drank herself into a coma had the signature tasting glasses been any larger.
“I’m having a good time, but I’m bloated,” said another who had pregamed the beer fest with a substantial amount of Bud Light Seltzer.
“This is a subpar excuse for a beer fest—in years past they had way more free stuff,” said a guy on at least his 15th free beer sample.
Northway Brewing’s Max Oswald had the only reasonable complaint: During the first session, a man had poured a beer into a bowl of maple sugar he had been using for sugared rims, inexplicably mistaking it for a dump bucket. “It’s dry!” Max exclaimed, still fired up by the time I showed up with a not-sketchy-at-all Tupperware of replacement sugar. (His neighbors at Saranac Brewery corroborated the story.)
Thankfully, no such travesty occurred during the three-hour afternoon session (good thing: Max still had the rowdy evening crew to get through). Instead, more than 600 attendees meandered through the Saratoga City Center, listening to live music, playing corn hole, shopping at booths set up around the perimeter of the room, sampling more than 125 craft beers from dozens of local and national breweries, and, apparently, talking to me.
“You put it in front of me, I’ll drink it,” someone said when I asked his favorite beer. “Mine used to be Green Line from Lagunitas,” his friend chimed in, evidently mistaking the California brand for Chicago’s Goose Island, which brews the pale ale. “But now it’s the Unified Beerworks Mango Sour”—a.k.a. the Fruit of All Evil. Someone else added that he likes Whitman Brewing’s Gangster Scientist, but is a bit biased: “I go there twice per day,” the man said of coffee shop/brewery Walt & Whitman. “In the morning for coffee to get energized and in the afternoon for beers.”
Next I caught up with a fun-looking, Hawaiian shirt–wearing group from Westchester who come to the Beer Summit every year and stay with a friend in Saratoga. The first year they came, the friend told them all they had to wear Hawaiians. “We had no effing clue it wasn’t Hawaiian themed,” one of them told me. “But now every time we come, we wear Hawaiian shirts. It’s tradition.”
A common theme of the day was the overwhelming obsession with the woven parachute cord tasting glass handles one vendor was selling. “I got this for my teenage daughter to use for all her shot drinks!” one woman told me excitedly, before turning her phone to show me that she was FaceTiming said daughter, who had clearly just gotten out of the shower. “I’m going to go home and put this on my toothbrush,” one of the volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club said of the accessory. That was the first I’d heard about the charity’s involvement in the event, so I asked about it. “You know what?” he said, holding out his tiny beer glass with its tiny handle. “We’re making the world a better place, one beer at a time.”
—Natalie
See more photos from the Saratoga Beer Summit here:
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