Gnarly Hops & Barley Fest

Gnarly Hops & Barley Fest is a craft beer festival held in Culpeper, VA. The 2015 Gnarly Hops & Barley Fest was my first visit to this event.
It is recommended you pre-​purchase your tickets online. There is a limited number of tickets. If there are any left the day of the event at the gate — they are priced at $ 35.00 per ticket (which is $ 10 more than they cost online).
The tix are provided via EventBrite — so we used the EventBrite app on our iPhones to digitally present our tickets. We had to show ID at a tent outside the gate, then were given a blue wrist band, showed our tix to get in, and were then given a small beer glass with 10 tickets for beers. One tasting per ticket.
The event runs from 12:00 noon to 6:00 pm. It was a cold, overcast day with a threat of rain — and yet the place was packed to the gills! There was a stage set up with live music, lots of food vendors, and over 30 breweries to sample from.
We hit a number of breweries — and not all of them. Some we intentionally skipped for various reasons (Dogfish Head — we’ve drank many of their beers), Anheuser-​Busch (NOT a craft brewery — EPIC FAIL! I don’t classify Shock Top as a craft brewery — which I guess makes me a beer snob!)
We sampled beers from Blue Mountain Brewery (Afton, VA); Schlafly Beer (St. Louis, MO); Devils Backbone Brewing Co. (Lexington, VA); South Street Brewery (Charlottesville, VA); Legend Brewing Co. (Richmond, VA); Wild Wolf Brewing Co. (Nellysford, VA); Apocalypse Ale Works (Forest, VA); Duclaw Brewing Co. (Baltimore, MD); and more…
One thing that I will massively ding the event organizers on — is the availability of Don Jons. They were a total of 13 of them — and the line to use them was very long. It took 25 minutes of standing in line to get to the front of the line. They need to double or triple the amount of Dons Jons for future Gnarly Hops. With that many folks sucking down beer, it needs to go somewhere… fast…
Great event, we had a fun time, just did not appreciate the standing in long lines to drain the beer…