6. attend a beer festival

When I wrote up my 30 before 30 list, I aimed for realistic achievements. #6 on my list was attend a beer festival. Now I have to confess, we already had this planned before I wrote up my list. So was this a cheat of an idea? I don't like to think so. You see at the start of the year, the only resolution we made was to drink 52 beers in 52 weeks. And when I say beer I don't mean lager. I mean ales and stouts and the like, real beers. We hit 52 beers ages back so I decided to double my target to 104 beers by the end of the year. So we talked quite a bit about exploring new bars and even attending a beer festival to get the best variety of brews.

It was with that in mind that we bought tickets for the Independent Manchester Beer Convention (IndyManBeerCon/IMBC). From their own website IMBC describes itself as "a world class showcase for the best breweries from the UK and beyond. Taking over the stunning surrounds of the Grade II listed, architectural gem Victoria Baths for its 4th year from Thursday 8th October to Sunday 11th October, IMBC brings together the most progressive, forward thinking breweries from across the UK, Europe and USA for a multisensory, headlong, hop- forward beer extravaganza."

With 6 sessions held over the 4 days we bought tickets for Friday evening and Sunday. So after work on Friday, we headed down to Victoria Baths. Now considering this was both our first trip to Victoria Baths and our first beer festival, that Friday evening was a little overwhelming. Victoria Baths is a beautiful building so we were a little distracted by our surroundings and quite baffled by the huge choice of beers. We wandered from room to room, trying to make sense of the online beer list, and navigate around the crowd (beer festivals can be quite the sausage fest if you know what I mean). In total I had a solid 6 beers on Friday night but now of them really stood out to me as amazing. Nothing I fell in love with.

Sunday was a much better experience. Seeing Victoria Baths flooded by natural light was stunning and I can massively see the appeal of getting married there, it's such a special building. The crowd didn't feel as overwhelming on the Sunday and I made the choice to stick to the types of beers I like. For me that can be a dangerous game as I am a dark beer girl, give me your stouts and porters please. But I loved it. I drank some really delicious beers on Sunday. The walk home was a bit more stumbled as I drank a heftier 8 beers in total but I have no regrets.

Overall I had a great weekend at IMBC and I would definitely go again in the future. It was such an interesting experience and helped me hit my boozy target for the year (I'm actually up to 107 beers now). I'm sad we didn't take more advantage of the amazing canning service, where you could get any beer canned to take home but lesson learnt for next time! What a great way to kick off my 30 before 30 though.