Cajun Cafe Beer Festival November 2010

In mid-November, Glenn and I headed to the Cajun Café Beer Festival. Cajun Café is a great restaurant in St. Petersburg with fantastic food and great location. We were really impressed with this festival. It is unique because the owner doesn’t use one particular distributor and spends the year stockpiling interesting micro-brews. He also invites some of the local Home brewing clubs. It was really cool to get to see some of these passionate beer makers and try their beers:

The festival was well laid out. Each table had six to fifteen beers to taste.

The tickets also included a fruit and cheese plate and a Taste of Cajun Café plate – gumbo, red beans and rice, crawfish cornbread. Yum! Plus the band was so fun!

The beer festival highlighted a few of the beer trends:

- Super hoppy beers: I think this trend may be ending – thankfully, but it seems like breweries were completing to see how much they could out-hop each other.

- High alcohol – We had trouble deciphering between the 13% beers. They all had a very sweet, alcohol taste.

- Aging in a bourbon barrel – The fest had two bourbon barrel ales – Windmere Reserve and a local home brewer’s version. The Widmere Reserve has nice flavor, but we were impressed with how the home brewer was able to produce a very balanced smooth beer.

- Sour beers – I hadn’t tasted a sour beer before and the Festival had a couple stunners. It reminded me of sitting back in the back of bus on the way to Washington DC eating sour balls until we burned the insides of our mouth. The highlights were Zuur and the Cascade Creek Northwest Style Sour Ale. The Cascade Creek was the best at the Festival. It was smooth, full bodied and a great palette cleanser.

We picked up the best tip – a pretzel necklace. A lot of the beers had very strong flavors – sour, hops, and powerful stouts. We definitely needed a palate cleanser after some of those.

We will definitely go again.