Thursday, September 01, 2005

A curiosity of Irish Fest

Two weekends ago, I went to Milwaukee to hit IKEA with Yosh so he could shop for a couch and a TV stand. He found a lovely TV stand at IKEA and an even lovelier leather couch at Dinesen's in Milwaukee. Congratulations, Yosh!

After this whirlwind of driving and shopping, we decided to go on a pub crawl before heading to Irish Fest to see a bunch of drunk, red-haired, fair-skinned and pugnacious people (I'm all out of stereotypes...do you have more?). The first and, it turns out, only stop was at County Clare Inn and Pub. We'd intended on going to a few more Irish joints before heading to the Fest, but the Guinness was awesome, the locale was lovely, and we saw they had a free shuttle to the Summerfest grounds for the festival.

How could we lose?

So, we ordered a few pints from the nice bartender who looked like Rob Killips and then hopped on the shuttle, a school bus, natch. After getting dropped off at the Summerfest grounds, we walked around for a bit, getting our bearings amongst countless Guinness t-shirts and apparel-oriented odes to Eire. Toward the northern end of the grounds, we got an absolutely lovely dinner of corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and bread, washed down with a side of cheezy potatoes.

At that point, we made the horrible realization that we'd been at Irish Fest a whole hour and hadn't yet gotten a beer. Shocking! So, we skedaddled to Lakefront Brewery's stand on the shore of the lagoon. I had Snake Chaser Irish Stout, and Yosh had Riverwest Stein.

So, you might be wondering why I haven't mentioned having a Guinness at Irish Fest. Well, that's a funny story. Turns out the major sponsor of Irish Fest is Miller. Not surprising, since it's in Milwaukee and Miller owns Milwaukee. The only problem is that Guinness is distributed by Budweiser. Ahhhhhhh...

That's right, people. The Irish Fest was without Guinness. Is it even permissable to call it an Irish Fest? I have to wonder.

The rest of the evening was filled with drinking. I remember it all, but it's probably boring if you weren't there. But, I did impress Yosh by opening some weak-ass guy's beer against our bar table. Hey, I have a few tricks up my sleeve...

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