Yesterday Ben, Nora, Shelley and Our Bold Hero went to the Brewer's Bazaar in Stillwater (Shelley: "it's like if Grand Avenue were a town"), where for $25 you got a tasting glass, a brat, all the beer you could drink and all the polka covers of rock standards you could stand. Once there we met up with Beth, Will, and special guest Brian Payne: a veritable Lawrence mini-reunion.

Zack was supposed to come too. Oh, Zack. I actually ran into him outside of Sweeney's on Friday, and I can verify that his whiffle ball team, the Reds, has the best uniform ever. Possibly even better than the Achewood one.

Speaking of odd encounters, later on Friday night I ended up meeting the co-owner of the Gnome during happy hour drinks with the coworkers. You can rest assured that I told him how much their patio rocks.

At the Brewer's Bazaar I also got into some interesting conversations with local beer royalty. Well, not royalty, but nobility: two of the MnBeer contributors, who spotted my MnBeer T-shirt. One of whom was wearing a Rogue Hawaiian shirt. I'm going to start a twitter-style personal beer blog, maybe today, so that you don't have to listen to me going on about Rogue here.

Well, no promises. That stuff gives you superpowers.

(I didn't even realize that there were multiple MnBeer writers; that's a standard setup for topical blogs, but I hadn't even thought to check. Also, every state should have a beer site. I'm talking to you, Ben: think of how little work you'd have to do!)

The weather was a little worse than I'd expected, but there were both indoor and outdoor tasting booths and we fled inside whenever the gray sky sent down the occasional drizzle. Surly and Town Hall weren't there, and Flat Earth — while good — didn't bring their new beer, ostensibly because they couldn't bottle it with the name Black Helicopter, hmm, so the highlight was getting to taste Lift Bridge for the first time. Farm Girl was pretty delicious.

Ben used his people skills on the brewers and came away with an interesting story. That sort of socialization is probably beyond my ken, but I did work up the courage (some of it liquid) to ask for a Summit Suicide, i.e. six kinds of Summit mixed together. It was... not bad. Not great either. (Quoth brewer and BHS alum Brian Schanzenbach: "Congratulations, you've just invented Brown Ale.")

I call a mixed soda a swamp, but apparently that's not how they roll here in the Cities.

Anyways, it was a good time. There are pictures of some of our antics, somewhere out there...

We left around 4, with Nora as the DD, and while my drunkenness soon faded I had a buzz that lasted all night. I have some videos of me sucking at Halo to back that up.