World Beer Festival - St. Petersburg - 9/22/12

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No experience, but I plan on checking it out when it comes to Ft Myers.
 
World Beer Festival is produced by All About Beer Magazine. AAB has produced the WBF event in Raleigh, Durham and Columbia SC. The Durham event is coming up October 6 and will be the 17th year. Raleigh and Columbia are not too far behind that. World Beer Festival will be one of the very few beer events where the participating breweries are not determined by distributor boundaries. the make up of the event is blind to the wholesaler relationship. Check out more at www.worldbeerfestival.com and www.allaboutbeer.com
 
Well the fest was decent. It was well organized and they made the venue look nice, although it is a pretty cool venue by itself. The beer selection was good. They had a nice representation of local breweries. The few negatives I saw were price, volunteers serving beer that had no idea about beer, and VIP was extremely lacking. The festival was $40 ahead, and $50 day of. The festival the year before this was not this pricey and it does seem like a little much given what was offered. It was staffed by volunteers and some reps from the breweries. Most of the volunteers did not know anything about beer and some knew nothing about the beer. When asking them about the beer they were serving, most just started reading the bottle to you and some didn't even know what they were pouring. The VIP was very disappointing and not worth it according to my friend that paid $75 ahead, and was available for $85 day of show. He said they had tortillas & beans in one line and pulled pork & mac and cheese in the other. He said you were not allowed to get food from both lines. He said for the extra $, you should have been able to eat anything available up there. He said there were some free beers available from the VIP, but they were not anything to write home about. As a whole, it was a good fest even though it did need some work. Would I go next year, maybe. The price is steep for what it is and there were very few new beers that I have not already tried. There are other beer festivals in the area that are at the same price point that offer much more.
 
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