Brew At the Zoo

I thought going to the zoo in South Dallas was a long trek to make for 3 ounce beer samples, but I already had the tickets and nothing else going on that night. If not for the coupon deal that allowed me to buy tickets at half off the entry price, I don’t know that I would have gone.
Regarding the location, the only animals I saw were a pair of flamingos in a pond. Most of the activity was focused near the entrance to the zoo. In addition, there aren’t really any lights near the animals, so it’s not like you really had the chance to share a beer with a gorilla or giraffe.
When you walk into the zoo, you are given a small, plastic 3 oz. beer glass and 8 tickets. Eight tickets? There was nothing on the website that said I’d be limited to 8 tickets. Fortunately for me, there was disorganization at the entrance that allowed me to go through twice and grab 8 more tickets. I also got a 2^nd glass so I could fill up two at a time. They were selling additional sample coupons, but I had no need for them.
Once I got to the main portion of the event, I was surprised by large number of people in attendance. My surprise quickly turned to annoyance once I saw how long the lines were. Great.
On the plus side, they had a large number of brewers in attendance. Unfortunately, I think they were also overwhelmed by the number of people and couldn’t pour samples fast enough. To my benefit again, the brewers sometimes forgot to collect tickets.
I was pretty much ready to give up on this event and go home due to the long beer lines until I found one section of vendors away from the rest that didn’t have as big of a crowd. There were good beers in this section: Rahr & Sons, Leinkugel, Stella and Franconia just to name a few. Their location resulted in smaller lines, which finally made this event enjoyable for myself. Beer after beer, I sampled them all. I got to the point where I didn’t offer up the ticket unless they asked. Some did, some didn’t.
It was obvious there were some kinks in the event. I’m going with 3 stars because of finding the spot that worked out best for us. I think the organizers can learn from the initial year if they plan to do this again. They primarily just need to be ready for the amount of people.