All Pints North 2015

This past weekend we went up to Duluth, MN for the All Pints North beer festival.  This has become my favorite of all the MN Beer festivals.  I'm not sure if it's the fact that we're getting away for a weekend or the summer vibe or the fact that it's in one of my favorite cities in the state or what it is, but it is just my favorite of all the beer festivals.

We drove up on Saturday and just spent one night, next year I might be tempted to have us go up on Friday so we can have a little extra time in Duluth, but it worked well for this year to just go one night again.  We dropped off Ollie in the morning with Nate's parents and made it to Duluth by around 2:00.  The festival started at 3:00, so we had just enough time to drop off our things at the hotel and then walk over to the park.

The gates opened and the bagpipers lead us inside the park.  I seriously love that every beer festival starts with bagpipes!  We stopped at the Surly Brewing Company tent first, we knew from past experience that their lines would get long and they would likely run out of some of the special kegs they brought, so early would be better than later.  We tried their Nein, which is their ninth anniversary beer.

Happy to be out and about together 

We hit up a few other places, ran into a few people we knew from the Cities and then decided we needed a little food to go with our brews, so we grabbed a hotdog from my favorite food truck of all time, Natedogs.  We also grabbed some water (it was pretty warm, even for Duluth and our rule was one bottle of water per hour so we wouldn't get heatsick) and parked on a hill in the shade for a bit.

Best hotdog ever!

It's so fun to people watch at these events!  It was such a beautiful day.  It was pretty warm, but the breeze off Lake Superior really helped a lot.  The backdrop of the iconic Lift Bridge in the background was pretty neat too!

Crowd shot - Lift Bridge in the background, you have to love it!

Of course I made Nate take a bunch of selfies with me.  He's a good sport.  

Outside of the Bent Paddle tent (they are local to Duluth) they had cute whiskey barrel tables and stools to sit on so we stopped there for a bit.  I thought this was so cute - barley in a beer can.  I might have to duplicate that for our Oktoberfest party this year!

Another selfie while Nate was in line getting something.  I wanted to show off my hat.  I remembered it was very sunny with not much for shade last year so I decided a hat was very necessary!

Bent Paddle also had a giant Jenga game, so we decided to play for a bit.  Nate was the victor, but it was a very close game.  We had the tower almost taller than both of us for a time!  

Festival outfit! 

Shirt and top - Stitch Fix, Hat - Target

Bag - Thirty One, Sunglasses - Fun Sisters

Shoes - Thrifted

He is pretty much my most favorite of all time ever.  

Pretty soon it was 7:00 and the party was over!  It goes by so fast.  We made sure we paced ourselves well, we shared everything and as I mentioned, we made sure to drink plenty of water too.  We stopped by the merchandise tent to pick up a shirt I liked, we each grabbed one final beer taste and then we started our walk back to the hotel.  

We had to take pictures by the Lift Bridge on our way back to the hotel of course!

Our hotel was right next to Canal Park Brewing Company so we stopped over for an after festival snack and a final beer and sat outside and enjoyed the view of Lake Superior and watched people walking the boardwalk.

Lift Bridge at night

We grabbed breakfast on Sunday morning at a restaurant not too far from the hotel, then drove about twenty minutes north of Duluth real quick to stop at a smokehouse we love to get some smoked fish to bring home with us.  Then we drove back home to the Cities and were reunited with our boy.  We really had a great time though.  I absolutely love this festival and plan to return again and and again. I'm already excited for next year!

Surly Open

A month or maybe even two at this point ago, Nate told me about a disc golf tournament sponsored put on by Surly Brewing (best MN beer to those of you not from here) and it wasn't too expensive to sign up.  So we decided to be bold and take a chance on it.  And then we promptly forgot we had signed up until a week ago when I remembered and was like "hey, when is that disc golf tournament again?"  It was a good thing I asked, we looked it up and found it was scheduled for this past Saturday, so we remembered just in time!

It ended up being a ton of fun.  The weather appeared that it was going to maybe be uncooperative, but by the time we dropped Oliver off at Nate's parents and drove the almost half hour north of the cities to the disc golf course, the rain had pretty much ended and the sun was even coming out.

It was a shotgun start, so basically everyone signed up at a hole to start and at 10:00 you went to your hole and started launching your discs.  Being that this event was put on by Surly, the Surly Beer Truck was open for business so we grabbed a glass to take with us, because when else can you drink beer at 10:00 in the morning?  Each group could have up to five people, but no one signed up with Nate and I - or maybe they never found us - so we just went with the two of us, but that was ok with me, much less pressure!

The name of this disc golf course is The Pines - and you can tell why.  Pine trees are EVERYWHERE.  It is absolutely gorgeous though.  The holes are paved out between the trees and some of them are very unique!  The trees provided some awesome shade as the sun came out too.

The course has 27 holes (!!!) but we only had to play 19 of them.  My only one complaint was that Surly had it's own scorecard for the event that marked the holes we were supposed to play, but due to an Ultimate Frisbee event also going on fields we had to throw across it got confusing in some places.

19 holes of disc golf doesn't take nearly as long as actual golf but let me tell you, by the end you'll find yourself quite exhausted.  Most of the time when we play on the weekends it's at a course with nine or twelve holes, so this was a lot more than we're used to.  But as I said, the course was so unique and beautiful.  I'd really like to go back there sometime!

I had to take a picture of this tree carving.  Rocky the Flying Squirrel with a tennis racket?  Not sure what that has to do with disc golf, but hey, why not right?

And naturally I had to get a selfie with my hubby in the woods.  We really had fun even if we didn't score super well.  That part wasn't actually that important.  At the end of the event Surly did a drawing for every participant to chose a raffle gift and I ended up with a $25 gift card to the Surly Merchandise store and Nate got an awesome ultimate frisbee.  So hey, the points don't matter and everyone wins!

We also each received a free disc golf disc and free lunch.  And of course there was beer.  It's a Surly event, there is always beer!  I would definitely play this event again, it sounds like next year will be their 10th Anniversary too, so you know they're going to do it up big!  And I have a whole year to improve my game, ha!

The Beer Dabbler

So it's no secret to readers of the blog here that Nate and I are pretty into beer.  We're lucky that the craft beer industry is absolutely booming here in Minnesota.  There are quite a few festivals throughout the year that we have enjoyed going to and this year we decided to try one we hadn't before - The Beer Dabbler at the Winter Carnival in St. Paul.  The event was this past Saturday and we had a blast!  We decided to splurge and get "VID (Very Important Dabbler)" tickets and that was the best decision we could have made!  We got in a half hour early and got to start drinking beer right away, we got free hats, free food, access to a heated tent and no lines for bathrooms - yeah, totally worth the extra price!  Anyway, I thought I'd share some pictures here (if you're Facebook friends with me you've already seen these, so apologies for the double post in that case).

Above I'm drinking my first beer of the day.  You'll notice too that this event was outside.  Normally in Minnesota you'd be crazy for going to an outdoor festival in January, but we lucked out and had a day of warm weather - it was actually in the 40's, so I got by with a sweatshirt and a puffy vest!

Of course I had to take a selfie with my favorite person.  We don't look at all excited about the fact that we had a babysitter and could be out of the house drinking beer together do we?

You could choose which color hat you got as a "VID" ticket holder.  I chose a pink/blue/purple one because I'm such a girl.  Nate chose a maroon and gold one (Go Gophers I guess!)

No beer festival is complete without a lineup of food trucks.  I was SO excited that one I've been wanting to try for ages was there - O'Cheeze, a gourmet grilled sandwich truck.  Yep, sign me up!!

We had some sort of chicken chipotle grilled cheese with cheddar and pepperjack cheeses.  Sounds like it would be super spicy, but it wasn't too bad.  Another awesome thing at this festival was that they had meat and cheese samples available for free inside the Colosseum (this event took place at the MN State Fairgrounds) - so we ended up spending close to an hour in there sampling cheeses.  There were some beers being poured in there as well so we didn't have to go without!

These last couple of pictures are just me being silly.  Above I was showing off my dorky necklace that was very useful - it holds your beer glass so you can be hands free.  However, somehow mine managed to fall out of the necklace in the mud, so I was sad panda thinking I was done having any beer, but Nate said "come on, let's just ask for another one".  I didn't think there was anyway they'd give me one, but when they saw we were "VIDs" they said we could have one.  Um, score!

One of the MN Breweries, Dayblock Brewing, also has bacon, so they had a giant bacon strip outside their booth, so I was like, I need a picture with the bacon.  Because bacon.  I love bacon.

We didn't partake too much in the free booya stew we also got as VID members, we could have as many bowls as we wanted, but given the food trucks and cheese samples, we pretty much filled up on that and didn't need the stew.  Also, it was just not that cold out, so we didn't feel the need for that to help warm us up.  As for the beers?  There were good ones out there, we found a lot of the breweries weren't stepping outside the box too much, but I will say the two best ones I think I had was Stir Crazy (winter ale) from Indeed Brewing that had peppermint added and then Summit had their Oatmeal Stout with cinnamon and vanilla on cask - that was quite delightful!  Overall we had a great time and I would definitely consider going to this festival again and I would absolutely pop for the VID if we do.  Our next big beer event won't be until the summer more than likely, so I'm glad we did it up pretty big for this one!  
Hope you all had a great weekend too!  If you're on the East Coast, I'm thinking of you, hunker down and stay safe in the snow!