Brews by the Bay

You probably already think we crammed a lot into our relaxing week at the Broadkill Beach Club. Well, there’s more!

The weekend before the Fourth, we headed to the Cape May-Lewes Ferry Terminal in Lewes for the first ever Brews by the Bay Beer festival, hosted by the Delaware’s Brewers Guild. It was a hot day, so we took a chance (the ticket said to bring lawn chairs) and came with our easy up in hand, figuring that shade would make the afternoon a lot more enjoyable. They let us bring it in and our instant shade and lawn chairs gave us quite the nice little setup. I don’t think we would have lasted very long at the festival without the shade, but with it, we stayed the whole time!

As far as beer festivals go, this was definitely a smaller one, with about 6 different breweries in attendance. But what they lacked in number of breweries they made up for with varieties of beers–each brewery seemed to have at least 4 different taps to choose from.

And Dogfish Head, who was clearly king of the festival, brought about 10 different half kegs of beers, which they would tap, kick, then put in something new. I’ve seen other breweries do this at other festivals to create “buzz” and I think it worked here for them. Over the course of the afternoon, more and more people started hanging around the Dogfish tent, waiting for the next beer to show up. They had everything–from their classic 60 Minute IPA to their newest beer, Positive Contact.

The festival also had some food–all decently priced from local restaurants including one of our favorites, Bethany Blues. We sampled the Bethany Blue ribs and pulled pork. The beer was definitely a nice distraction from the all you could drink beer!

There were also a few games, including corn hole and a dunk booth set up. Big Larry pretty much ran the corn hole all night–he’s quite the skilled player! The rest of us enjoyed listening to the live band while we sipped our beers.

All in all, we had a great afternoon at Brews by the Bay, and I think we would go back again. I thought it was a good size for a beer festival and I really enjoyed being able to sit down and hang out with everyone instead of having to mill around the whole time in a packed room. It was also fun to have a big group there, because (like always) we did a pretty good job of entertaining each other!

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