Melbourne Beer Festival May 19-21 2005

[Jino]

I can't understand why they didn't utilise more of that huilding. It was huge and they used the smallest wing of it!

 

[bagnol]

I attended the Saturday morning session and really enjoyed myself. The crowd was small. It was easy to get to the beers and there was plenty of them to go around.

I have always tried to attend the early sessions as they good to avoid the morons that are just there to get pissed and make arses of themselves. I reckon there may have been 300-400 people at the session I went to compared to over 2000 the night before. Plenty of room to move. Easy access to the bars and beers. The beertopia bartenders seemed more knowledgeable about what they were serving, and it was easy to have a chat with the different brewers and stall holders.

The only fault I found were that the toilets were too far away. The long walk to the urinal took away precious sampling time.

Bagnol

 

[bouncingcastle]

I went on the friday night session.

Got fed up and left at 10:30 (30 minutes shy of session time). Had to wait forever to get a beer, and by 9:00 the varieties were dropping.

I managed to sample a lot of stuff from the microbreweries, and have a chat to the G&G guy. But what really got to me is that the crowd wouldn't shut up and let the seminars happen. I was looking forward to hearing what some of those folks had to say.

Oh well... Not sure I'de spend $35 on that again, but I did manage to discover a few new beers.

 

[NRB]

I went to the Saturday 11am-2pm session like bagnol and found the attendance numbers to be perfect. I didn't find the beer numbers adequate however... "400 beers, 1 place" my arse - there were more like 100-150 beers and half of the ones I wanted to try weren't there.

I came prepared. I printed out the list of awards and chose the beers I wanted to sample - about half of them were available.

If I had one word to describe Beertopia, it would most-definitely be DISAPPOINTING.