Beer is good food

An evening of beer, more beer, talking with friends and pictures at the Helsinki Beer Festival.

We went to the Helsinki Beer Festival and it seemed a lot more subdued this year as compared to last year. There didn't seem to be a band and you could actually move around the hall without feeling squished. The selection of beer was also much smaller this year and all of the good Belgian beers had run out by Saturday evening, too. I suppose the trick of getting the good beers is to go on the first evening. The beer expert Michael Jackson was reportedly at the festival this year as well, but noone seems to have seen him or known his whereabouts. It's a big hall, but not quite so big as to not bump into someone like that all evening.

The Russian beer Baltika was something new and was reasonably tasty. Sahti was a nice treat as well. The Estonian beers from last year weren't there this time around much to my dismay as they were memorably good. I managed to avoid the Lapin Kulta and Koff booths on the principle that had I wanted either of them, I could have saved myself 7 euro for the cover charge and bought a 6-pack of them for less money at the corner grocery. A group of us expats congregated, drank and talked for much of the evening and, when we had exhausted all the good beer choices, headed into the center for drunken disco to entertain the more sober people at Baarikärpänen. The highlight of the evening was getting to see Arabella's tattoo of the international power switch icon which caused an instantaneous "more geekier than thou" reverence from us all. She could go to any of the programmer cons and be enshrined. It would be even more amazing if tattoo inks were luminescent. :)