Yesterday I attended the Mash Beer Festival with two friends, tickets for saturday were sold out a few weeks ago and early this week they announced Friday's ones also got sold out.
It was our first time at the festival and we landed there a little bit early so we decided to have some food before jumping in and have our stomachs filled before tasting some of the beers :)
The venue for the festival was Nau Bostik (Bostik warehouse) an old factory that ran out of business several years ago and ended up converted into a cultural open center.
I loved some of the paintings in the walls and the old gates giving access to the different spaces.
After checking in, we got our festival glasses and three tokens to exchange for some of the beer we wanted to taste. There were 46 craft brewing companies, several of them from Spain, the USA, the UK, France, Poland, Ireland, and Germany which makes the festival quite unique as visitors have a chance to taste craft beer from different areas of the world besides the local ones. Once in, you could find a food area with some food trucks and a nice sunny terrace to eat.
As we already had lunch we directly entered one of the tasting areas where the first booth I saw was Garage Beer, the organizing brewing company based in the city, I had a chat with Alberto, one of the owners, and tasted one of their IPA beers.
Little by little the place was getting crowded and we had to hurry up to be able to chat with all the local companies and explain our model as we were trying to recruit most of them for the alpha version of our new venture.
Here are the booths of two of the area brewing companies, Espiga and Oddity.
I loved some of the festival merch. I ended up forgetting to get one cap so I will have to come back next year to get one :)
After two hours of tasting and chatting this is how my festival cup ended up.