A couple weeks ago I won tickets to Oktoberfest. Friday night I went with my brother, Jeff. We had a ton of fun, though I was a little disappointed that there weren’t nearly as many booths as when I went to Beer Fest. Luckily there were still plenty of new to me beers to try. We headed over to Oktoberfest as soon as Jeff was done work. I knew from last time that it gets crowded fast, and lines grow long later in the night, so we wanted to get there as early as we could. It was nice to go with someone else, so we could get different beers and try a sip of each other’s.
Once we got inside you had to buy tokens to try the beer. The beer cost anywhere from 2 to 5 tokens. There was also food from different restaurants in Calgary. The food varied from 3 tokens for chicken wings to 7 tokens for sausage. I ended up eating a cheeseburger slider and brisket on a pretzel bun. They were both pretty good.
While we were there we ran into some friend’s of Jeff’s They really wanted to try some spiced Jagermeister, so we headed over to the booth and we all got some. I have to admit that Jagermeister definitely isn’t one of my favourites. The flavour is just too strong for me. Luckily the cinnamon in the one we tried helped a little, but it was probably my least favourite one of the night.
These cups were included with admission, and were what we used for the beer. One of the vendors mentioned to me that it was a third of a can of beer. I thought that was a pretty good amount, as I got a good sense of the beer, but it wasn’t too much so I could try quite a few different ones.
I tried moonshine for the first time. The one on the left is the apple pie flavour which I had, and the right one is plain moonshine, which Jeff had. Before I drank it I smelled it, and you could definitely tell it had a high alcohol content. It actually tasted pretty good, but after a few moments I was feeling warm. I have no idea how my brother got his down.
There’s this amazing little ice cream place downtown (Village Ice Cream) that was on the way back to the train station after we left Oktoberfest. We decided to stop and get some. I went with the vanilla honey one and loved the strong honey flavour in it. Jeff got the lemon sorbet and liked how sour it was.
Have you ever been to a beer tasting or Oktoberfest?