We’re here for the Maine Brewers Festival, one of the big highlights of the beer-drinking year. We drove up on Friday, the event was on Saturday, Sunday, we have to go home.
We didn’t do much of anything on Friday, except drive up here. We did take a detour to The Good Post Office to collect the mail, as Mike usually does during his lunch hour on Fridays.
But it was kind of a waste, most of what was there was unsolicited junk…catalogs with cheesy stuff in them, solicitations for cable TV, insurance marketing, you know the drill.
Anyhoo, by the time we arrived in Portland, it had already gotten dark, and we both were tired. We had been thinking about going to The Great Lost Bear, which is one of the world’s best beer bars…they have something like 65 different beers on tap. It is so great, that Michael Jackson came to visit. There is a big picture of him hanging over the bar, standing in front of a long row of beer taps.
No, not THAT Michael Jackson, the late King of Pop! No, this Michael Jackson was a British writer and an authority on beer. I have some of his books. Now, that would be a dream job for me…getting paid tom travel all over the world, drink beer, and then write books and magazine articles about it!
Anyhoo, the only two things thee men have in common is sharing the same name, and that they are both dead.
But we didn’t go to the Bear on Friday night. We just walked to the Pizza Villa joint across the street from tghe hotel and got some pizza, and brought it back to the room.
The next day, we went to the beer festival. But first we had to buy our Sea Dogs tickets for 2010. We’ve found that if we don’t buy them the day they go on sale, we get stuck with crappy seats. I scored us some decent seats, for six games.
The beer festival was awesome. More breweries than they had in the past, it was hard to decide which 12 we would taste. They only let each person have 12 tasting tickets, for 4 ounce pours…some stupid Maine state law or something. But we could taste more beers each if we got different ones, and sampled each others beers!
I met up with one of the organizers of the event, who had some free festival swag for me. She appreciated my promoting this and next week’s New Hampshire Brewers Fest on Twitter and Facebook, plus she asked me some questions for promotional articles she was writing. Anyhoo, free swag is always nice!
After the festival, we took the bus to the Old Port and had dinner at Fore Street. This is our absolute favorite restaurant, and we hadn’t been there in ages.
The meal was wonderful, just two mildly annoying things. The first was someone who thought that bringing an infant into a high end restaurant was a good idea. The baby screamed almost the whole time, nobody took it out until they were ready to leave themselves. At least this group as halfway across the restaurant from us…but still, I felt sorry for anyone who had to sit next to them.
The second thing was more weird than annoying. We were seated at a table in a long row of two-tops, with a long bench on one side, and chairs on the other side of each table. Mike was on the bench, I was on the chair. At th next tqble was a younger couple, late 20’s/early 30’s, I guess. The guy was on the chair and the girl was on the bench. I couldn’t get a good look to see if they were wearing rings, so we could bnot tell if they were married or just dating.
We were already seated when they came in, they obviously had been waiting at the bar, as they were each carrying a glass of wine. They seemed perfectly okay at first. Then, we noticed that the girl had her head down on the table. They guy was trying to make here get up, only to have her slump down on the bench, her head almost landing in Mike’s lap.
She sat back up, only to slump back down again several more times. My first thought was that she was drunk…maybe they had gone to the beer festival, and drank more than she could handle. For Mike and me, 12 4 ounce pours is enough to get a little buzz on, but not falling-down, passing out drunk. Still enough of a buzz where driving would not have been a good idea, thus taking the bus and calling a cab to get back to the hotel, after the buses shut down for the evening.
Or maybe she was just sick. Either way, the guy should have been concerned enough to take her home, but he insisted on ordering dessert. She clearly wanted to leave, but he refused…at first. Finally, in a pissed off tone of voice, he asked the server to pack up his dessert to go. Then he made the girl pay the bill. I have no idea what the real deal was with these people, but it was just kind of weird.
After dinner, I called a cab to take us back to the hotel. If you are ever in Portland and need to take a cab, I highly recommend ASAP Taxi (207-971-2727). They are polite, reliable, and they don’t try to rip you off by taking you on the scenic route of Portland. Our hotel, the Inn at St. John, recommended them to me ages ago, and we’ve never had any problems with them.
For the second night in a row, I thought I would have to call the front desk to complain about annoying *neighbors*. Friday night, the guests directly upstairs from us were stomping around, it sounded like there was a herd of elephants stampeding up there. This went on until around midnight or so, then they finally settled down. So far, it’s bee quiet up thee tonight. I just hope they didn’t go to the evening session of the beer festival, and then out to the bars afterward, as many people do. The bars all close at 1AM, I think, so if they are coming back, it’s gonna be VERY soon.
However, we had to endure the loud family in the room next door, with a toddler who screamed incessantly. The adults were banging on the walls, slamming doors, and otherwise making a ton of racket. They’re lucky they all shut up before I called the front desk…if they got kicked out of the hotel, they’d have a hard time finding another place to stay. With the beer fest in town, most of the decent hotels were fully booked weeks in advance.
I need to go to bed now, we have to check out of here by 11AM. After we leave here, we want to go to the Shipyard store in Portland and get some bottles of some of the beers we tried at the fest. Then we’ll have lunch somewhere, either at the aforementioned Great Lost Bear, or Federal Jack’s in Kennebunkport.
Whichever one we feel like, when the time comes!
