Get Real NY Craft Beer & Food Festival

I love beer.  And if it's possible, Alex loves beer even more than I do.  Actually, it's definitely possible because his love for beer is verging on obsession.  Anyway, New York is great because there are beer festivals all year long.  Every September we have NY Craft Beer Week and the rest of the year features various smaller events.  This weekend was the Get Real NY Craft Beer & Food Festival.  We went back and forth on attending because Alex's family is in the town this weekend, but we ended up deciding to just go for it.  The fun thing about this beer festival is that not only could you sample lots of different craft beers from different breweries, you could also sample food from twenty or so NYC restaurants.  Some of our favorite restaurants/stores were represented - shrimp rolls from Luke's Lobster (which were probably my favorite bite of the evening), chicken or pork tacos from Cascabel Taqueria (the pork tacos were my second favorite bite), pork sausages from Jimmy's No. 43, and cheeses from Murray's Cheese.  

And then there was the beer.  I think we tried roughly 16-20 beers (including the one pictured above).  Alex's two favorite beers were both by Williams Brothers Brewery - a Scottish brewery.  We tried their Fraoch Heather Ale and their Alba (a Scots Pine and Spruce Ale).  I will agree with Alex that their beers were by far the most distinctive of the bunch.  The Fraoch was strangely sour (but in a good way).  We actually had a pine ale a few weeks ago at What Happens When, so the Alba Ale wasn't nearly as surprising.  His next favorite beer was a "robust porter" that Bierkraft aged in a Tuthilltown Baby Bourbon barrel.  Otherwise we tried a bunch of IPAs (including Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA and Ballast Point Sculpin IPA), a bunch of pale ales (Lagunitas New Dogtown Pale Ale was one of the better ones), a few porters (including Stone Brewing Smoked Porter with Vanilla, which they were pairing with dark chocolate in a tasting panel we sat in on for a few minutes, and the Ridgeway Querkus) and a bunch of totally random beers.  There were just too many to remember.  Some of our more unusual beers (aside from the Williams Bros. beers I already mentioned), were the Ridgeway Querkus (a smoked porter) and the Sixpoint Righteous Rye.  I'm not enough of a beer snob that I could tell you about the flavor profiles of the beers, but I know what I like.  And this was a really fun way to try a bunch of new beers - several of which I have never seen before.