The Beer Dabbler - Winter Carnival

This was my first time at the beer dabbler and it was super fun! Tickets are $55 for all you can drink + a souvenir glass. At the event, you can go stand to stand to sample all of the different drinks (each brewery had 3-4 options on tap). It was definitely crowded but that added to the energy! Be sure to keep moving in the beginning, once it got closer to 6pm lots of the breweries we're running out of the popular options. Another fun tradition I learned about was snacklaces! My friends and I got together the night before to build them and they definitely kept us fueled in the cold for the entirety of the event.

The Beer Dabbler has become an amazing yearly tradition for my friends and family! It's a fun event to look forward to when the winter weather is getting you down. For $55 you get 3 hours of unlimited beer, wine & thc drinks in your souvenir cup. It's the perfect size to get a good taste of a beer and move on to the next booth. I love using this event to find out what I like/don't like in drinks! There are some awesome sculptures, performers and warming areas - plus lots and lots of port-a-potties so there's rarely a long wait. I loved that they included the colosseum this year!Pro-tip, spend the night before making a snack lace! They're tradition here and are the best to munch on. Also highly recommend wearing snow pants unless it's 35°+ - I've made the mistake of not wearing them and ended up going home after an hour since it was unbearable. My deduction of a star is that there's really no water here - or at least that I've seen in the past 3 years. This is an event where you get intoxicated pretty quickly without really realizing since you're just drinking the small tastes - and I wish there were water stations to hydrate/remind us to hydrate. Also, with the addition of THC drinks just be careful about mixing your substances - this is something I didn't think about and had some regrets. Overall - highly recommend this event to any beer drinker looking for a great winter activity! Worth the money!

This was my first experience at the Winter Beer Dabbler and it will definitely become a new winter tradition! For the $55 ticket, we had 3 hours to test as many beer samples as possible. When you walk in, you receive a small cup to try your beer in. Held in the Midway area of the state fairgrounds, the vendors are set up down the row, each with their own tents and 3-5 offerings. This year was a lovely temperature, it stayed in the 30s, but we did all bundle up with our long coats and snow pants for extra warmth. You can bring in either an empty water bottle to fill at the two filling stations (which were a little hard to find) or you could bring in a sealed water bottle. I had one in my pocket and no one really checked....You can also bring in small snacks in the form of snacklaces! My friends and I got together the night before to make necklaces of cheezits, pretzels, cheese sticks, beef sticks, and my personal favorite - the gummy lifesavers. I also brought a small bag of cheetos but never broke into it.We stopped at the Tipsy Steer for a late lunch and to have our IDs checked to receive our wristbands. After we ate, we took a shuttle bus over to the grounds! we still had to have our tickets scanned once we arrived, but did not have to wait in the 100+ person line to have our IDs checked. Also, there were two areas with lots of portapotties! All in all, the beer dabbler was a wonderful time and I can't wait until next year!

Went to the Winter Beer Dabbler last weekend and I have conflicting feelings about it. We went to a local brewery for pre-wristbanding and to use the free shuttle over to the event. The shuttle (a school bus) didn't know where to go, and dropped us off about a mile from the entrance. Luckily some people knew how to get where we needed to be and we followed them. Once we got to the entrance area, lines weren't clearly marked and it was kind of chaotic. We paid extra for early access, got there late because of the shuttle, and then all the people around us had regular admission and were allowed to enter. What's the point of paying $20 extra for early admission if everyone can just get in at any time?? Overall, a really crappy start. The rest of the event was fine, we sampled a lot of good and not so good beers, and had fun. I wish the smokers would be considerate and move well off to the sidelines while enjoying their cigars/cigarettes, because the stench is overpowering especially in the beer lines. Otherwise the crowds were laid back and fun.

This review is for the 2014 Beer Dabbler held at the Fairgrounds-midway. Tickets for general admission were 35.00. I am not sure what I was thinking buying four of these tickets only to have to wear ski pants hats and jackets to stand in line to get a few ounces of beer but I did it...This would have been more enjoyable had the beer been spread out so large crowds did not congregate around some of the more popular beer places and you could access how largethe line was for people actually waiting in line vs. just standing there talking. The "fires" they had were inadequate...metal gates around a pile of logs burning with three to four security people around it. Come on.....why not enclosed fire pits or how about those large free standing heaters that run on propane.... and a place to sit around the warmth. We arrived at start of pour and were ready to roll within the hour......I did not want to work that hard and freeze while doing it to get a beer. Half of the vendors did not educate or have much to say about their product and a lot of them had frozen taps. I like to hear about the beer and brewery but the weather and the crowd just did not lend itself to much of that. I am not sure why this could not be placed in one of the building on the fair grounds even if it wasn't heated it would certainly have been more enjoyable.. I guess I should have just signed up for a beer dinner or organized my own little brewery tour. I love events and happy that this is offered but hope they take the feedback from this year and improve upon it....

New year, new location and better organization definitely turned this event around for 2012. Given that they sold 5,000 tickets to this event, I have to give the organizers credit for wedging that many thirsty people into essentially one city block. Yes, it still took about 20 minutes to get in, but certainly understandable given the crowd size.The beer selection was quite good, with many options available for both the casual beer drinker as well as those continuously on the hunt for something new. There were a few firkins thrown in for good measure as well. Many breweries had staff on site to chat about their beer, which is always appreciated.The live music was also a nice touch, there were plenty of fires/torches going to warm up by in case your liquid jacket wasn't thick enough, and the handful of food trucks that made it out were icing on the cake.Well done Dabbler folks, a very big improvement from last year.

A bunch of complaining wusses giving low ratings because of weather? WEATHER? Don't hate the player, y'all. Hate the closeted weatherman. Grow a pair and beer up, there are over 150 breweries to choose from!A great old time with food, live music, snowbound activities and fun loving beer loving folks. You want a warm place to drink average beer? Stay home, stupid.

Oh dear. I hate being negative but this was one badly organized event. We arrived just after 3:30 but didn't get in until around 4:45. Once in there were no maps to show which stalls were where. I had to rely on my memory to find the stalls I wanted to see. My memory isn't good at the best of times and after a few drinks disappears entirely.The snow hadn't been cleared so you spent most of the time trying to wade through several inches of snow which wasn't fun with a sprained ankle. Also why was the space behind the stalls cleared but not the space in front? That was crazy. Finally I don't understand why an event as busy as this only had half the park open. I suppose some of the space was for the fireworks but why did we need fireworks at a beer festival? In summary get more entrances, ditch the fireworks and buy a fecking snow blower.

This event seemed to be 1) extremely poorly organized 2) oversold.Gates should have opened 2 hours before beer service started, as we arrived at 3:30 and did not get in to the park until after 5:00!! The beer selection was great, but by the time we got to some tents they were already out of some brews. Not plowing snow in front of HALF of the booths was RIDICULOUS!! The group I went with still made the most of it and we enjoyed ourselves, but I would hope if they do this for a 3rd year they have a MUCH better organization plan, and only sell a limited number of tickets.

This was my first visit to Beer Dabbler (Jan 2014). We took the bus there, which was easy and free since free bus passes were provided to ticket holders. The selection of beverages was good, there was good music, and here were enough porta-potties. The positives stop there. Upon arriving, it was a freaking MESS. There was no people or signs directing attendees where to get bracelets and people just crowded the entrance. Glasses were broken and you couldn't even move. The crowding continued in the beer lines. Some of the beer tents had the name of the brewery on their tent, so you could see where things were, but most of the tents you had to get up close to to see the sign on the tables or taps....thus the crowding. It was frigid cold and there should have been several more fires than there were. People were cold and only lasted an hour or two. We lasted a couple and decided to get out of there by hopping one of the bar-provided shuttles. Well, they never came! We finally started walking down the street to catch a cab and we saw one and they let us on. It immediately filled up...this is blocks before the actual pickup location, so there were all these people waiting for shuttles at the pickup location for who knows how long out in the freezing cold and drunk!This could potentially have gotten four stars. All demotions were due to the planning fails of not making adjustments for the weather, not requiring the beer tents to have signs visible from afar(crowding) and not herding people into goddamn lines! It could have just been understaffed because there are too few people who are crazy enough to work in that weather. Who knows?!