oktoberfest

yesterday after noon we followed up the cross race with a trip to the capitol city brewing company's oktoberfest down in shirlington. according to spearman & DT - who we ran into at the festival - the crowd was thinned a bit from last year by the weather but there were still a good number of people braving the elements. the street in the shirlington "village" shopping center was closed and twenty-some brewers were set up in the middle of the road under a row of ez-ups. we sampled beers from many area brewers and brewers from further afield and had some great bratwurst served up by large german women.

if i was smart, i'd have kept some notes to help write this up as there were so many beers sampled that it's hard to keep them all straight and remember all of the names. most of the beers were pretty good, but a few fell short. had a couple of good pumpkin beers and a few good wheats. not surprisingly there were a lot of breweries serving up oktoberfest (and marzen) style beers, one of my favorites. these were mostly fair but none really shone, which is a shame as this can be a great style. the highlight of the day for me was the chocolate donut stout which has got a lot of mentions from DT and stoner. it had a great flavor with a solid malty base with undertones of chocolate and caramel.