August is Craft Beer Month here in Virginia. We celebrated by buying VIP tickets to the Virginia
Craft Beer Festival hosted at the Devil's Backbone Brewery in Nelson County, VA. It was a great
set-up, and you absolutely cannot beat the views! It was really hard to get any good shots of the
mountains without all of the festival stuff, but just imagine the photos without the food trucks,
fencing, and tents and I am sure it would be beautiful on any given day.
With our VIP tickets, we got entry 1 hour earlier than everyone else, great seats under the tent
close to the stage, private port-a-potties (no standing in long lines, haha!), tasting glasses and
16 ounce glasses, and ten tasting tickets each. Between the two of us, we sampled 20 different
beers from the the 32 breweries there. Each brewery had 2 beers being offered. Some were so-so,
others were amazing, but I can honestly say none of them were bad!
My memory is a little fuzzy, but some that we tried and liked were:
Strangeways Brewing - Wallonian Dawn Honey Saison (my favorite)
River Company Brewing - Wood Dog Porter
Wild Wolf Brewing Company - Blonde Hunny and Berliner Wolf (Matt's favorite)
Mad Fox Brewing Company
Center of the Universe - Pocahoptus IPA
Blue & Grey - Fred Red
Extra Bill's Smokehouse & Brewing - Citra Ass Down
Wolf Hills Brewing - Fighting Parsons Pale Ale
Three Brother's Brewing - The Admiral
Hardywood Park Craft Brewery - Gingerbread Stout
Sunken City Brewing Company - Dam Lager
On stage, we watched Brian Elijah Smith with Krista Polvere & Ethan Hawkins and The Derricks. All
were great! I really loved the cover of Miss Ohio by Brian Elijah Smith with Krista Polvere & Ethan
Hawkins. I wish my daddy had been there to hear it. He introduced me to Gillian Welch through this
song earlier this summer, and it reminded me of him!!
You really can't beat a beautiful summer day, local craft beer, local music, and the backdrop of
the Blue Ridge Mountains... just awesome!
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