Thoughts and Musings...

Beerfest/311

Yesterday was a great day to be outside and have some fun. It was mid-20s Celsius and not a cloud in the sky for the entire day (as you can see from the pics).

Me and my friend Alex went to the Toronto Festival of Beer in the afternoon. We got there around 2pm I think. We had to wait in line as there was a ton of people there. Once we got our cups and 4 tokens and headed in, it didn't seem too crowded, so that was nice. We knew we'd spend our tokens quickly so we picked up 10 more each, giving us 14. For most beers each token gives you 4oz. and two gives you 8oz. (the size of the cup they gave us). The first tent we went to was for Steelback, which was right at the beginning. Gross. I think the next thing we tried was this 15 per cent beer, which cost more than the rest at 2 tokens for 4oz. Uber gross. It got me feelin a little more loose, but I had to throw about 1 1/2oz. away because it was fuckin horrible. I don't know the order of what else I had, but it consisted of my new favourite Heineken, Carlsburg, Kokanee and my first tastes of Foster's and Red Stripe, which taste very similar and equally bleh.

We chilled out watching this guy play some blues on stage, watching human foosball in the Carlsburg area and the rest of the time we stayed by the Red Stripe area where they were playing reggae music that made the day great. We ran into a buddy of ours from highschool and said hi as we were buying that gross 15 per cent beer. We didn't feel like hanging around with his people so we sneakily broke off.

Our long walk downtown.

I call it the Bike de Triumphe. Clever.

Alex is excited and running.

We left the beerfest around 6pm and proceeded to head a hell of a long way down to the 311 concert. The walk didn't seem that long, especially when you feel a good buzz in you. We even managed to stop by Mamma's Pizza on the way.

Here's the opening group. They were pretty good for people I hadn't and still haven't heard of. They weren't the scheduled bands. You also get to see where our original spots were until we HAD to get water after drinking nothing but beer all day and reluctantly gave them up.

I don't know what happened in this pic, but it looks cool.

Here's a clear shot of 311 performing. You can see where we're at now.

I think this picture sums everything up. Totally random with the guy in front of me too.

So we get to the Kool Haus where the concert is, and the lineup is forever. We were pretty far back, but managed to get in close when the time came. The bands that were originally scheduled were Pepper and the surviving members of Bob Marley's group The Wailers. I don't know what happened, but they didn't show. So another band performed and I didn't manage to catch their name, but they sounded pretty good.

After we lost our sexy spots, 311 came out and performed a pretty lively show. I enjoyed the performance quite a lot. The only complaint I have was when Nick Hexum and SA sang at the same time, the sound got really distorted and you couldn't really make out what they were saying at all.

My two favourite things about their performance would have to be when they played Amber and did this drum routine with all the members of the band in between two of the songs. I also liked how they managed to play 24 songs, which was way more than I was expecting seeing as how Metric played about 16 or so.

Overall a great day and lotsa fun.

Peace.

Edit: After actually looking it up, I found out the opening band's name is Panic & The Rebel Emergency... although Panic wasn't there.

posted by Sean @ 7:03 PM Comments: 31