If you’ve been following along for more than a year, you know that Ricky and I have attended the Arizona Strong Beer Festival every year since we’ve lived here, and have had the chance to meet master brewers from places like BrewInMind. It’s the only beer festival (and there are a LOT!) that we will attend EVERY year. It’s, well, pretty much the best beer festival in Arizona. Some might argue that, but I believe it would be the consensus. It definitely features more rare beers than any other beer festival here. And that’s what we like – being able to try new beers that we haven’t had (and might never have again, who knows).

The last two years we have gone to the festival as press, covering it for our beer blog, 1001 Bottles. This year, we decided to just go all out and be regular, every-day, beer-drinking attendees. And so we did.

It’s funny, I’m not even really sure what to say about the festival. Obviously, I have been before. And I have enjoyed it every time. It seems to just keep getting better and better every year. I do need to figure out some easy way to control how much beer I drink, though. There are so many to try, it is very difficult!

I keep getting asked what was my favorite beer from the festival. I don’t know that I can pick a favorite. I have a list of over 30 different beers that I tried there.  Here are some of the more memorable ones:

Sun Up Brewing’s Barrel Aged White Russian

I’ve had this beer one time before, I think, at the brewery. It’s located here in Phoenix, but is just not one of the breweries we manage to find our way to all that often, unfortunately. But it is SO good! I love big, thick barrel-aged stouts, and this one definitely didn’t disappoint.

Peoria Brewing’s Imperial Peanut Butter Porter

Here’s another big dark beer (of course, they’re my favorite kind!). I also really love peanut butter, so of course I had to try this one. And I loved it! It was the perfect balance of peanut butter, in my opinion.

Jack Daniels Kilt Lifter

In previous years of the Strong Beer Fest, it has seemed like Four Peaks typically always has the same beers at every festival. But this time, we got some brand new ones we’d never seen before. There was lots of new barrel-aged stuff, including the Jack Daniels Kilt Lifter. This one was quite good. Kilt Lifter is a great beer by itself, but it was fun to get the whiskey flavor in it for something different. Yum!

Dragoon Lazarus

According to Ricky, this was the best beer of the day, and I can’t argue too much. I can’t argue because 1) I do remember this beer being good, and 2) well, unfortunately, I can’t remember this beer QUITE as well as some of the others. It was late in the day… but it was a good beer!

So once again, it was a successful Strong Beer Fest and a successful kickoff to Arizona Beer Week. I know there are plenty of beer events going on in the valley this week, so I hope if you live here you get the chance to check some of them out. Cheers!

Last week I heard about this event that was coming to Phoenix – The Marvel Experience. As much of a geek as I am, I was surprised that it was the first time I had heard about it. Apparently, Phoenix is only the first stop on a U.S. tour that the event is on. It sounded like something unique and interesting, so I requested a media pass to the event to be able to check it out and write about it. I thought they could use a little more publicity, since this was the first I’d heard about it. I got two media passes, so I invited Ricky to tag along so he could do his own review of it on his blog as well.

When buying a ticket for it on Ticketmaster, the ticket times are staggered, and you can buy one for an entry time of any half hour during the hours they are open. Our media passes were for any time on Sunday, so we picked them up at will call and just got in line. The outside setup was pretty impressive, and after parking and getting in line, it almost immediately reminded me of standing in line at an amusement park ride, particularly the Outer Limits ride at Kings Island in Ohio, which I’ve been on countless times.

The initial line wasn’t too painful, and we were ushered into an area where we were given a wristband with a piece of plastic on the top that was supposed to track our progress. (There were places set up to register our wristbands, but they weren’t working. I’d tried to find some reviews of the Experience ahead of time, and read some things that said this was because they were out in the sun, but I don’t know that for sure.)

After getting our wristband, we were ushered into a tent with TV screens and posters of Marvel superheroes. We got our picture taken in front of a green screen at the beginning of our wait in line. Again, comparing this to an amusement park ride, the line wasn’t too bad, maybe a half hour or so. But this was also the third time we’d had to wait in line so far (to get in, to get a wristband, and now to enter the next tent).

Once we made it through this line, we watched a video instructing us what the story was about and then moving along into the next tent (this tent may have been one of the several domes, but I didn’t notice for sure) which was the “Training Academy”. This part would probably be good mostly for children, with informational screens and mini-games you could play. From what I could tell, the major attractions were the rock-climbing wall and the maze. But Ricky and I skipped those, because – go figure – there was a line for each of them and we didn’t feel like waiting again. You could move on from the Training Academy whenever you chose to, but once you did, there was no way to go back in. Not a big deal to us, as we felt like these were mostly kids’ games anyway. So we moved right along.

After given a bit of instruction and some Marvel trivia from what seemed like the most enthusiastic staff member we encountered during the whole experience, we moved into what I believe was the largest dome. We watched as a fight scene unfolded around us and when it was over, we prepared to enter the transport, the next stage of the Experience.

This part was probably my favorite part of the whole thing. The setup was highly themed and again reminded me of the beginning of an amusement park ride, and actually, a pretty good one. I won’t spoil the ending or what happens in this stage, but to me, it’s definitely the best part of the whole experience.

At the end, you end up in a Marvel gift shop (again, not unlike the rides at Disney World or Universal Studios) with the opportunity to buy Marvel merchandise as well as purchase your photo that was taken earlier on in the Experience.

All in all, we thought that this was a pretty enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. It seemed a lot like kind of an extended version of an amusement park experience, with different stages that would suit both children and adults alike. I’d recommend it if you didn’t have to pay for several people/children to go, as the price ($27.50 for adults, plus Ticketmaster fees and $10 for parking) could potentially be a barrier in that case. Also, the fact that you have to wait in line multiple times could cause children to grow pretty tired and antsy (the ones in front of us certainly did) and also get old to adults as well. But if you’re looking for a fun and unique experience to spend a bit of cash on, especially if you’re a Marvel fan, I’d recommend the Marvel Experience as a good way to spend an afternoon in Phoenix. Check it out while it is here at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick through January 3.

Okay, so since I’m on a roll and only have one day left to post about for WDS, I’m going to finish it up today. Here you go!

The last day of WDS. I don’t have as many pictures from this day, but it wasn’t really any less eventful than any of the others. I just stopped taking as many because the race was over, I guess. This was the last chance to earn any points, so I went to see the speakers in the morning and then ran around getting a few more points for the race. I ended up, sadly, coming in 4th place by 1 point! The girl in 3rd place was only 1 point ahead of me. Boo. I was pretty upset about this, but, that’s life, I guess. One cool thing did happen… I ran into Chris Guillebeau outside of WDS headquarters. That kind of made up for being so bummed about the race.

After the race, I was feeling a bit let down, so I didn’t really stay for much of the afternoon session. Instead, I decided to head over to Rogue Brewery. It ended up being a pretty cool place, and I’m glad I went there. I am looking forward to seeing it again with Ricky in a little over a week!

After hitting up Rogue, I hopped on the light rail to head to the airport. On the train, I happened to run into someone else coming from WDS. It happened to be Kathy from BlissHabits.com, who I had communicated with on Twitter before WDS but had not run into until then! We had a great conversation, and she shared some of her bots with me since I had missed the session about them. She was so nice.

While the weekend was great, unfortunately, the flight back was not! It was one of the roughest flights I’d ever been on, with a storm going on in Phoenix. Despite all the wind, we made a safe (but rough) landing late on Sunday night. I had survived WDS, had a great weekend, and I am definitely looking forward to heading back again next year!