We went to the 3rd annual Hogtown Craft Beer Fest yesterday.  And, particularly with the Hunahpu Day fiasco fresh in our memory, we found it to be a very pleasant, well-run festival.

First of all, the venue is fantastic.  Instead of a parking lot (which is a terrible place for an event) or a patio (like the sour festival at Cajun Cafe on the Bayou in Tampa), this festival is in the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens.  So there was a bit of a scrum around the pouring stations, but we just had to get outside of that to enjoy lush scenery with plenty of shady benches.

The beer selection was pretty good.  There were a few larger breweries phoning it in (like Cigar City who, as far as I can tell, only brought a few of their year-round cans).  But for the most part, it was lots of small breweries from around Florida pouring 3-5 beers each.  There were plenty of heavy stouts and double IPAs.  But there were also a fair few saisons, kölsches, and other lighter beers too.

And, most importantly, the lines were short.  The longest lines we saw were for the food (a small plate from each “pod” was included in the admission price, so that contributed to this).  But all the beer lines were short and moving pretty quickly.