I just stopped by Dock Street earlier today and got a chance to try their new Sudan Grass beer before it gets tapped later on tonight.  Brewed with Sorghum, this is a rare beer that is celiac friendly.  I haven't tried too many (if any) gluten free beers in the past, but I haven't heard too many good things about them.  This one really is a quality beer though.  It tastes like a mix of a cider and a mead and has a nice sour taste.  Definitely another awesome beer from Dock Street and worth checking out.

Saturday, which seemed to be a mini-beer week with all the events going on, definitely turned out to be a great day for drinking beer.  Our choice of event ended up being the Rolling Barrel tailgating event at Citizens Bank Ballpark.  It turned out to be a very cool little event.  How can you really go wrong when you have Sly Fox and River Horse pouring all the beer you can drink and have all you can eat food compliments of Sweet Lucys?  I really found a liking for River Horse's Summer Blonde and went though quite a bit of them, as did everyone else as that was the first beer to run out. The lingering after taste from the wild yeast really made the beer.

After the tailgate event was over, we all moved into the ballpark to watch the Phills play.  Surprisingly the game didn't get rained out or delayed at all, but they did lose unfortunately.  I was very puzzled when I went to buy a beer though. As I was looking through the selection of Yards, Victory, and Dogfish among a couple other crafts, I noticed that all the craft beers were the same price as the generic, domestic beers.  The aluminum bottles of Bud products (which are perfect for lawn darts) were actually more money than the crafts.  This got me thinking: why would someone pay more money for a poorer quality beer.  Even if their intentions were just to get drunk, why not choose the craft beer which would be higher in alcohol.  By choosing a craft beer you get more bang for your buck in every way.  So, in order to figure out why people people chose the overpriced generic beers, I decided to go around and interview anyone holding an aluminum bottle. Aside from one response which was that they were trying to take it easy and didn't want to get too drunk, it seems everyones response was convenience.  They all just kept saying that the generic products were just right there in front of them and easy to grab.  This really makes no sense though as all the beers are located in the same area.  So in conclusion, I realized there really wasn't any good reason as to why they chose to pay more for less.  I guess most the blame has to be placed on better advertising on macro-breweries parts, but maybe we should take the advice of Dave Martorana and not be beer snobs but instead help educate the light beer drinkers of the world.  Hopefully things will change in Philly one day.  We're too good of a beer city to have a majority of our ballpark overpaying for an aluminum bottle of But Light.

After the game, thanks to Twitter, I remembered that the Institute was celebrating their one year anniversary and was, at some point in the day, tapping a keg of the extremely limited Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout.  Being very eager to try this, I convinced one of the drivers to take a chance of the keg having not kicked yet, and made my first trip to the Institute.  Unfortunately, the CBS had already kicked, but I have to say, they had one of the most impressive tap selections I've seen in a while.  Aside from at one point having CBS, they also were pouring Southern Tier Cuvee #2, He'brew RIPA (whiskey aged), Rogue Latona, and many others.  They also had firkins of Sly Fox Phoenix Pale Ale and Yards Thomas Jefferson.  Hanging out at the Institute ended up being one of the best bar experiences I've had in a while.  Heather and Charlie are really good people, and I had a great time talking beer with Heather all night.  They even said they are about to add some awesome Puerto Rican cuisine to their kick ass beer line up (which might be growing as well).  This is definitely a bar worth checking out if you haven't been there yet.  You can even hang out upstairs and play some Wii if you want.

All and all mini-beer week, even though I only made two events, ended up being a pretty awesome day.  From what I've heard, the other events all went really well despite the weather as well.  Thank you Rolling Barrel and Institute for putting together some awesome beer events.