6th Annual Winterfest Ales & Auction

We're taking beer to the 6th Annual Winterfest Ales & Auction in Lincoln tonight. It's a fundraising event for Matt Talbot Kitchen & Outreach, hosted by the Advertising Federation of Lincoln. I'm told they're expecting 700 people tonight, 100 more than last year.

We loaded up the kegs at 3:00 and started the 1½-hour drive to Lincoln.

Paris & I kept pretty busy pouring three-ounce samples of All-American Gold, Princess of Darkness Porter, Fire in the Hole! Rauchbier, and Bugeater Brown Ale, but I did get to take a quick break to take pictures of all the brewery booths.

Boz from Aksarben Brewing pours some Gold

Suzette from Finocchario Wine Company watches Bob try to remain upright

Empyrean's Rich Chapin pulls me a taste of his Cask-Conditioned Imperial ESB

Levi William and his band rock the house

Paris and me in the Gottberg booth

Travis says "Hopluia!" at the Spilker booth.

Sam Spilker evaluates Thunderhead's IPA, while Trevor Schaben looks inordinately pleased with himself

Maggie and Jenny have fun pouring Boulevard beers

Upstream's Zac Triemert provided some of his excellent bottle-aged beers

A good time was had by all, and then at 9:30 it was over. From the weight of the kegs, it looks like the Princess of Darkness Porter and the Fire In The Hole! Rauchbier were our most popular beers, or at least we poured more of them than the other two. (Lots of people tried the Rauchbier, but about half of them poured it out. You either like smoked beers or you don't.) We loaded everything back into the car and got home around 11:30. I'll take the kegs back to the brewery on Monday.

I need to figure out a better way to pour small quantities of beer from small kegs. The picnic pumps are handy, but they tend to leak a lot, and they're so low to the floor that pumping them all night was back-breaking work. I have a cooler with a cold plate and four taps, but it's a real pain to haul around and set up. Upstream had some nifty standalone taps that use tiny CO₂ bulbs; I think I'll look into getting a few of them.