EVENT: Getting Drunk Without Drinking Beer at Village Voice's Brooklyn Pour 2015

[photos by Conor Rose]

Here’s a #firstworldproblem for you: sometimes, I get invited to really cool food and drink events where I’m supposed to eat and drink everything, but I can’t eat and drink everything because I’m a glutard. Life is tough. This is why I've never attended a Brooklyn Pour, an event boasting over a hundred beers and what I imagined would be the most glutinous next to rolling in a wheat field - but I'm a lucky girl and I hit the jackpot by finding a boyfriend who likes to do things with me and who is really, really good at drinking beer [and he also happens to be really good at taking photos].
What's a GF GF to do? I didn't touch a drop of beer and managed to get relatively drunk off of everything not beer. All of the ciders were drank. The alcohol, fueled by the sweetness of a thousand apples, kept me giddy and sugar high for hours. Here are some of the highlights...



Cider-wise, there was an impressive amount of ciders represented - about 19 [I think? with some ginger beer thrown in. There were some liquor booths too, like Jameson, which we planned to hit up but then we drank too much of eveything else - oops]. Downeast Cider House still remains my favorite [it's basically apple juice] and didn't fail to let me down with both their Original and Cranberry Blends. I'm not a fan of super sweet ciders [sorry Rekorderlig] but recently discovered Austin Eastciders at a bar and despite the syrupy name, was really into their Texas Honey Cider.
Pumpkin beer is high on the list of gluten things I miss, so I was excited to try pumpkin cider, which isn't something easily found at the bodega - I went back to McKenzie's to refill my tasting glass after I had already hit up all the ciders, and found that most of the others were just a bit too sweet. There were, of course, significantly less ciders to taste than beer, so I kept circling the venue trying to keep my glass full by pouncing upon all the ciders I could find.







On the gluten side, IPAs were the main focus of the beer quest and Barrier Brewery IPA was the top choice. The event boasted bigger name breweries [Dogfish Head, Brooklyn Brewery] and there was the opportunity to try smaller breweries too - War Flag, Coney Island Brewing Company, among many, many others.











We stuck to drinking as our activity, but for everyone else, there were plenty of activities to go around - an extremely suspenseful Sam Adams Stein Holst competition, cornhole, bear pong, eating from food trucks such as Nuchas, and the opportunity to be a human six pack thanks to Whole Foods.


And here's everything we drank. Not too bad for people trying to keep it together in order to document an event, right? Also, was anyone able to check off all their boxes? By the time Brooklyn Pour was over, I felt like the apple version of the blueberry girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Conor had supplemented all his beer with sips of all my ciders, so we were feeling pretty good. Village Voice always knows how to do an event. To keep up with them and their upcoming food and drink events, be sure to follow them on their Facebook and Twitter!