Inspired by my recent ingestion of my 100th different beer from Night Shift (my first brewery to hit triple digits), I decided to start a new thing where I give an overview of my experience with different breweries. Hopefully it becomes a regular thing. I will only do this for breweries I've actually visited. Maybe that'll make me finally visit some of my favorites.
The Venue: Night Shift has an extremely large taproom in Everett, MA, about a $10-15 Uber from downtown Boston, and it's extremely popular, with visitors ranging from beer aficionados and local regulars to a mid-20's party scene. To be fair, I've only been on Saturdays. The mornings/early afternoon are more the former, and the evenings are most certainly the latter. They typically have anywhere from 8-20 beers available in the taproom. They also have food trucks (check their calendar), snacks, and other non-alcoholic beverages to go along with a bunch of board games (a brewery staple). They offer flights, so you can try a bunch without getting too plastered. During my most recent trip that put me over the century mark, I managed to have 15 different beers over 3 hours. I had 3 flights and 3 full beers. I should also note that they have Lyft deals to go between a few other greater Boston breweries, and both Bone Up Brewing and Short Path Distillery (not beer, but I highly recommend) are within 2 blocks.

The Beer: Their 'Weisse' series is what I think they do best. They're all super sour and quite good. That said, you don't get me to try over 100 beers without having a pretty good range of stuff. The picture above gives you a decent idea. A bunch of IPA's/pale ales, including two rotating series (One Hop This Time and Morph), plenty of dark beers, saisons, and a bunch of other styles. Recently, they've been making a bunch of Brut IPA's. They also have a light beer. Their most popular stuff is obviously good. Whirlpool and Awake are notable and worth getting. Unfortunately, my 2 favorites (both 7's) don't seem to be offered very often. Overall, their beer ratings from me line up about with the average for all breweries by rating: 
1: 0
2: 3
3: 8
4: 40
5: 38
6: 10
7: 2
For you math people, that puts the average at 4.495 for their 101 beers (4.2% of the total beers on here). For reference, for the whole site (2405 beers at the moment), the average is 4.5099. That's deceiving though, because I've only had the best, most popular stuff from many breweries, and I've had everything Night Shift pumps out. Overall, you can expect almost everything you get at Night Shift to be good, but only a few will be really excellent.

Where To Get It: Obviously at the taproom, where you can also get beers to go. You can also get it in stores and bars around Massachusetts, but mostly in the Boston area. Check out their beer finder.
 
Anything Else?: Yeah, buddy. This past summer, they had a few beer gardens open in Boston. I expect that to continue. Also, they're opening a secondary permanent location at Lovejoy Wharf later this month to brew experimental beer, which will probably clinch Night Shift as my first brewery to 200.

This is the first of these that I'm posting, and I hope to do many more posts about beer fests I attend. I've attended 25+ of various fests over the years, so I know what I'm doing at this point.

The Event: Hosted by Beeradvocate and Dogfish Head, this fest has been going strong for 16 years. It's at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, and there are 120+ breweries who join to celebrate "pushing the limits of brewing". 400+ beers, and these breweries are bringing their A game. This year, they also had cider and mead options. You can find something for everyone. It's hard to find a bad drink here, though some of the more extreme ones might be...let's just say 'interesting'. Tons of stouts, IPA's, sours, and everything in between, above, below, and around the side. Another big draw for me is that there's a bunch of breweries that you can't typically get in Boston.

My Experience: I went to the 3rd session, Saturday evening. It was my 2nd year at this fest, and I learned some things from the previous year. The beer list is available in advance, so I looked that up and picked 15-20 that I REALLY wanted, and another 30 or so that I also wanted. I went full nerd, printed out the map and color-coded it so I knew where to go. I managed to try 38 different samples, which is definitely high for me for one of these. I didn't get to all that I REALLY wanted because some of the lines were long, and I prioritized trying more things to waiting in line.

The Beers: The best one I had was Aslin Genius Kitchen (stout), which was about as good as a beer can get. Other beers that were notably good: Benchtop Why The Gong Face (NEIPA), Springdale Elder Mother (sour), Dewey Secret Machine, MadTree Red Eye Chai (tastes like a dirty chai latte), New Holland Raspberry Lemon Kombucha, Throwback BBQ Porter (tastes like BBQ potato chips), Finback BQE Salty Caramel (stout), Weldworks Mexican Medianoche (stout), and Highland Park DDH Losing Control (NEIPA). 

Recommendations: You could go a lot of ways with this festival. Some of the most popular stuff runs out in the first 60-90 minutes, but there are so many good options. Definitely make sure to have a water every couple of beers (they do a good job of making water widely available). Also, the inside bathrooms tend to get long lines, but the outdoor ones don't, so don't waste time inside in line. I think one of these 3 methods would be best for beer consumption:

1) Do something similar to me. Make a list of 50-60 beers (more than I did). You can prioritize if you want. Just walk around to different sections of the fest and go to the ones on your list that have manageable lines, and skip the others (unless you need a break).  
2) If your priority is specific things, own it, just don't expect to get a ton of them. Wait in the lines right from the start (grab one from a short line first for while you wait), and once all the stuff you want is gone (or you tried it all), explore.
3) Wing it. You will enjoy yourself still and have plenty of good beers. 2 of the ones on my list above weren't even on my initial list.

Expect the last 30-60 minutes to be a giant free-for-all. It's likely half the beers will be gone, so be willing to mix it up. 

Finally, this is one of the few fests where it would be totally reasonable to go both Friday and Saturday and not need to try anything twice. If you do that, I'd say commit to getting a few particular beers you want with long lines each day. After Friday, you'll know which ones you missed, so get to those early Saturday.

Check out the top 100 breweries on RateBeer. I've only had 62 of the top 100 (including only 5 of the top 10), though I have had 94 different beers from the top 5 breweries. Goes to show you, there's plenty of great beer out there. 

Let's do this. I'll update the blog live. Who knows what kind of commentary will erupt. I've had a lot of beers already today. Details inside.

In honor of the start of football season. The beer is OK, but the name is great. Go Birds.

You gave every single one of us our fondest wish...a bigger wiener.

I was perusing the available options at Trillium's Fort Point (Boston) location, and I came across this label, and it needed to be shared.

For those who don't know, Storrow Drive in Boston is a major roadway, but trucks can't go on most parts of it due to height restrictions. Inevitably during college move-ins and/or around Sept. 1, when the vast majority of Boston leases start, someone will drive a moving truck on Storrow, crash into an overpass, and cause gridlock for hours on end.

​Trillium is just doing their part to raise awareness about this phenomenon, and I, for one, am thankful for it. To show my gratitude, I will go and buy numerous beers from their brewery, including this one. Hopefully I won't sit in gridlock on Storrow on that trip.

Now that we're over 2000 beers, I figured I'd share some data about beers and breweries on the site. Thanks to Tip Tap Room for accounting for probably a third of these beers with their fast rotating set of taps. On to the statistics:
Breweries: 490
Beers: 2022
Breweries with only 1 beer: 212
Breweries with 5+  beers: 117
Fox Farm highest average of those at 5.71 for 7 beers
Breweries with 10+ beers: 45
Ommegang highest average of those at 5.5 for 10 beers
Breweries with 25+ beers: 8
Trillium highest average of those at 5.34 for 29 beers
Breweries with 50+ beers: 3
Night Shift 4.52 for 79 beers
Sam Adams 4.41 for 69 (nice)
Harpoon 4.32 for 68
Most inconsistent breweries (biggest standard deviation of ratings) with 5+ beers:
Shipyard (3.55 avg), Goose Island (3.78), Heineken (3.29), Dogfish Head (4.78), Hermit Thrush (4.2)
Most consistent breweries with 5+ beers:
Cheeky Monkey (4), SixPoint (4.17), Pipeworks (4.2), Down The Road (4.3), Bone Up (4.33)
Worst Beer (this is unlikely to ever change):
Newport Storm Hurricane Amber Ale
Breweries with at least 1 beer 6 or higher rating: 150
Breweries with 5+ beers with 6 or higher rating: 15
Breweries with 10+ beers with 6 or higher rating: 5
Breweries with more than 1 7 Shyoh beer: 6 (Southern Tier only one with 3).
Beers rated 7 Shyoh's: 36
Beers rated 6 Shyoh's: 293
Beers rated 5 Shyoh's: 642
Beers rated 4 Shyoh's: 700
Beers rated 3 Shyoh's: 285
Beers rated 2 Shyoh's: 57
Beers rated 1 Shyoh   : 9

There's a lot more good beer than bad beer out there, and there are always new ones to try. I guarantee I will have more beers to add in the future (and maybe Josh will add some too).

Pete
Needless to say, we fell apart again on beer of the week, but given that we (read: mostly me) reached 2000 beers this week, I figured I would try to revive it. The beer:

Description: Very balanced beer. It's got a little bit of creaminess, sort of like a porter, but not quite a stout, in terms of body and finish. The flavor is a mix of mild piney bitterness and a blast of citrus in the finish. It's not overwhelming on the taste buds, so you can definitely have a couple, but it's 8.4%, so don't drive after.

What you should know: This was one of Trillium's first beers, and they still make it because it's awesome. Trillium excels at making hazy (New England) IPA's, sours, and dark beers. All their stuff is great. As far as their IPA's go, this is one of the more bitter offerings, but I certainly wouldn't call this beer bitter by any normal IPA standard. 

Recommendations: Make your way to their Boston brewery in the summer and get this if they have it. If they don't, just get whatever they have. They have beer lists updated frequently on the website for each location. After you've picked up everything they have at the brewery (I got 8 different ones last time I was there) and stashed it away somewhere, head on over to the beer garden and waste the day away. The last time I was there, I met a group of guys from Philly (go birds) who came to Boston just to come to Trillium. It's that good.