Marchfest marches to its own laid-back beat
The tricky thing about covering beer festivals is how much to get involved.
Should you take a detached fly-on-thewall approach or go into fully embedded, sensory overload mode?
At the 16th annual Marchfest craft beer and music festival at Founders Park on Saturday, we started at the detached end of the spectrum.
My friend Jane from Upper Hutt was attending her first Marchfest after previous attempts were thwarted by Covid. We joined the civilised queue outside the gates just after the opening at 1pm, under Goldilocks skies.
The guess-what-colour is on the Marchfest glasses – eagerly played at least by my household who had bets on dark green, pink or orange – turned out to be a fizzer. It was teal, the same as last year.
Putting that mild disappointment behind us, we headed to the tasting bar to sample some of the 15 craft beers specially brewed for Marchfest, mainly from local breweries.
We started on an entirely unscientific marking scale out of 10, but quickly realised that there were too many complex factors at play. How do you compare a sour beer with notes of coconut and vanilla to a pale ale with distilled pohutukawa flowers and Nelson raspberries, to a white IPA with coriander seed.
In the end, we decided they were all pretty good. And we discovered that if you concentrated hard enough, you could actually detect some of those fancy flavours of citrus and chocolate and caramel, and yes, coconut listed in the tasting notes.After that effort though, we needed a drink. Jane was partial to the Snakebite combination of pilsener and cider; I was more of an equal opportunity advocate.
The unwritten rule of covering beer festivals is that the quality and quantity of note-taking drops off alarmingly after the tasting bar.
So there are only snapshots from the memory to go on. An infant wearing big earphones wriggling on the lawn in front of the main music stage next to a greyhaired couple on camp chairs; brave souls in kilts or lederhosen; a man in a prison inmate uniform carrying a ball and chain, the energetic lead singer from the Queen tribute band telling the dancing crowd it was a different audience from the RSAs he usually played to.
There were realisations and confirmations: that there are a lot of people in Nelson you don’t know, that a lot of them know the words to Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag, that white sneakers are really popular, and it’s helpful to drink water.
Jane, who lives a stone’s throw from Upper Hutt’s Brewtown, was impressed by the Nelson festival experience.
She enjoyed the eclectic range of beers and music and was thankful for the short queues for the bars and the loos.
“I loved the relaxed, friendly vibe and the beautiful setting.”
Bring on number 17 (with differentcoloured glasses).