I always go to a beer festival with a well-thought out plan. And it’s usually a four-step plan.

1) Go and try the odd beers and those I’ve never had before as soon as I get there. That way I can remember what they taste like. Wait an hour or two and I”ll have had enough beer that I’ll stop paying attention to what I’m drinking.
2) Don’t waste time at tents for places like Little Creatures, Matilida Bay or James Squire. Not because they’re crap (which they’re not) but because their beers are very easy to find here there and everywhere. And frankly spending a tasting token on a beer I can buy at any bottlo in the country doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
3) Take it easy, tiger. Sure, there are lots of beers to try but I don’t need to slam them down in the first hour. I can take a more relaxed approach of spending a few hours sampling the beers at a leisurely rate.
4) Don’t be stupid and buy, like 40 tasting tokens at the start. There’s just no way I’d ever get through that many samples. Ten at a time is absolutely heaps.

And I usually fail to stick to most of those points because once I enter the beer festival I’m like a dog let loose off his leash at a park. Just careering around in a frantic rush. Though I will say I’ve never tried to smell anyone’s bum at a beer festival (yes, it’s a crap dog joke).
I was at the Trainworks Winter Beer Festival in Thirlmere last Saturday and started well with step No1. I headed straight to HopDog for their hand-pumped Steinpunk, then to old favorite Holgate for a nut brown ale (made with macadamia nuts. Mixed with their Temptress, they call it a ladyboy – Temptress with nuts. Geddit?).
I also hit Parramatta’s Riverside for the four new beers they had on offer and then, somewhere along the line, Stone and Wood for some Amasia and the Mountain Goat tent for some of their Rare Breeds and collaboration brews.
In between those beers I did break No2 and had beers that I could easily get at my local Dan Murphy’s. But that was because, in my day job as a newspaper beer writer I’ve met some of these brewers and wanted to stop in, say hi and have a chat. And brewers, as they do, ask you ” what’ll you have to drink?”. Seems rude to say “no thanks, I’ll pass.”
No3 I failed at dismally, which is in part due to the ease of avoiding No4. I snaffled a media pass, which meant I got free samples all day. So there was no need to buy any tokens at all. That free pass was wonderful, though it did make it far too easy for me to hit it too early. I think I went through close to 15 samples in the first hour, and that included some beers clocking in at more than seven per cent. I got there at noon and effectively hit the wall about 3pm, two hours before the festival finished.
To be honest I could have paced myself a bit better. If I did it would have stopped me from missing out on the Hop Thief from James Squire, the Sunset Ale from Two Birds, and all of the beers from The Little Brewing Company. That’s the tricky thing about tasting beer – trying to do it without getting smashed.
I haven’t really mastered that yet. But I’m quite happy to put in all the extra practice needed to get better at it.