Brick City Beer & Wine Festival

Several weeks ago, I read about a Rotary fundraiser happening in downtown Ocala entitled the "Brick City Beer & Wine Festival."  It definitely looked like something that Doug would be interested in going to this weekend, but we decided not to buy tickets to it online.  We wanted to check it out in person first.  The Tom Petty festival in October wasn't what we thought that it would be and I would have hated to spend a lot of money on it.  I had also read about that some of these festivals being scams.  Thus, we thought that the best course of action was to head downtown at 2 p.m. today just to see what it was all about.  If it was a bust, we were going to go to Big Hammock instead.  I had been very interested in going back as I loved their turkey panini.  

The festival ended up being a lot better than I expected.  For one price, Doug got a tasting glass that allowed him to sample over fifty different brewery tents.  I paid the small non-drinking fee and toured the venue with him checking out the speciality vendor tents.  We were there for several hours and Doug tried almost twenty different samples.  Some breweries were local, others were from South Florida.  Doug really enjoyed learning more about them.  I looked at the different specialty vendors and listened to the music from the Battle of the Bands.  I never found the soda tent, but I did buy a Florida state flag to hang in our garage before we left.  My reward for taking Doug was dinner at Big Hammock.  The turkey sandwich was just as good as I could remember.

We spent the rest of the night watching basketball games and hanging out on our back porch by the fire pit.  Last night, we saw IU women's basketball tournament run come to an end against a tough South Carolina team.  It was predicted to be a blowout, but it ended up being a very close game.  The Hoosiers played tough, but lost by four.  I was sad to see their season end.  Illinois men lost tonight, but I wasn't sad about that.  Alabama was the other winner tonight which we didn't really care too much about.  They will play in the Final Four against UConn next weekend.  With a lot of the lower seeds winning this year, it has definitely been one of the most interesting tournaments that I could remember.