Coming at you a few weeks after the fact, this entry is about the New Belgium Brewing Clips of Faith tour hitting Raleigh for one night as part of the 14 city summer tour. Clips of Faith brings small films and big beers from New Belgium out on a cross country summer tour to benefit local charities in each city. Raleigh was one of the lucky cities to be included on this year's schedule with all proceeds going to Triangle Spokes Group, a local non-profit charity that buys news bikes for kids in need as I discussed in my earlier post.
The weather was fantastic on the evening of the event which took place in the new downtown City Plaza at the southern end of Fayetteville Street Mall. Much like many midwest and west coast beer festivals, Clips of Faith offered beer pours in 3-4 oz glasses that cost 1 token each. Tokens were purchased from a booth to be used at the two beer tents.
On the plaza, we were able to BYOC - bring your own chair, and sit to watch the short films made by normal folks across the country most of which involved New Belgium beer in some fashion.
While at the festival, I ran into Steve - founder of TriBeer and Thomas - another local beer geek behind the Geistbear Brewing Blog who were both volunteering at the event. I also met Rich Nowalk of Triangle Spokes Group who was rightfully very excited about the event as the crowd started to grow before sunset. We both discussed how New Belgium may have drawn a larger crowd had they not held the event on the same night as the NC State football game that was being broadcast on national television. Either way, the event appeared a success to me.
Having drank nearly every year-round offering from New Belgium since they started distributing in NC over a year ago, Michelle and I stuck to the Lips of Faith tent and enjoyed the arsenal of specialty beers offered. Being that it's been nearly three weeks since the event, my favorite of the night escapes me. You will soon understand why though as I blog my next post or two that covers what I have been up to the past couple weeks.
Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to, the workday did not allow Michelle and I to bike2beer for the event though I was very happy to see how many other people did. This night, of all nights was a good night to be living downtown.
Word on the street is that New Belgium wants to bring this event back to Raleigh for 2011. I can assure you I will be there and I would recommend you do the same.
Check out the video of the evening below that I borrowed from the Triangle Spokes Group website.
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