Made in the Shade Beer Tasting Festival

75°, breezy, out of phx nice. With friends, this place is awesome. Lots of costumed locals and holy-​crap-​i-​need-​out-​of-​the-​heat Phoenicians. Local beers, pop beers and beers from afar. Corn is awesome too.

Beautiful setting in the pines of Flagstaff with a great range of AZ and regional breweries. Got to try Dragoon Brewing from Tucson and for me they had the best IPA of the festival with wonderful citrus and strong hop character. A well run event with plenty of food vendors on site. Only blight was the fiasco at 5pm when several thousand people were trying to get on shuttle buses which seemed few and far between or find taxis to get back into downtown Flagstaff… this needs to be remedied but in true craft drinker’s spirit most people showed patience with this problem!

When I think about heaven, I think about beer taps as far as the eye can see that pour deliciously crafted high gravity beer. Despite some minor details that I will point out here, this beer festival was basically like the heaven I always dreamed about.
For $ 40 (in advance) you get a mini mug and 24 drink tickets that can be used to get any beer at any of the stands. The city of Flagstaff offered up its bus line to drive participants to and from the county fair grounds where the festival was being held, FOR FREE. The line to get into the fest was ridiculously long but it went by very quickly. The lines to get beer were long but they also went by very quickly. We created a system, we would stand in line and get a beer and then drink that beer while waiting in the next line. What ended up happening was that we would have to slam our mini mugs because the lines went so fast and we were getting faded too quickly. I’m not talking about some pansy ass 5.0% beers, nah, if these beers had nut sacks, they’d drag on the ground, 11% muthafuckas. I tried to get a list of all of the breweries that showed up but I got drunk and forgot.
Now for the downers, the festival is held at a country fairground that hasn’t been paved in 50 years, the ground was in bad shape. Huge potholes were making people drop like flies and this was 10 minutes into the festival — by the fourth hour after plenty of beers, we didn’t have a fighting chance. Secondly, I saw several people throwing their beers into the trash. I feel like these people should be escorted off the premises immediately and banned from ever coming back to future festivals. I know these issues aren’t the festivals fault and they have to give a ticket to any asshole with $ 40 but it still made me mad to see them wasting beer.
TIPS: Buy your tickets in advance, they are $ 50 at the door and they sold out quckly. If you’re coming from out of town, find a hotel within walking distance of the bus stop. Wear a pretzel necklace.