Raleigh World Beer Festival

Triangle Beer lovers
enjoying the Lonerider Tent

Like a kid in a candy store.

An often overused phrase to describe a moment of extreme joy and excitement, but a phrase that immediately comes to mind when I think back to my emotions while attending The World Beer festival in Raleigh last year.

Booth upon booth of craft breweries as far as the eye can see. A bounty of kegs and bottles of delicious beer. A four hour window in which to sip, savor and sample to your hearts content.


The World Beer festival is an over 21 candy store.


Sponsored by All About Beer magazine, the festival took place in Raleigh's Moore Square this past Saturday, April 5th, and featured all manners of craft beer, local vendors, musicians and food trucks.

I've attended several similar events in my years as a craft beer enthusiast, however this time I enjoyed the awesome beer scene from a new perspective: volunteer pourer.

Armed with volunteer tee shirts and complimentary food vouchers, me and two of my best beer buddies strolled into Moore Square a couple hours before the gates opened, ready to serve the thirsty Triangle crowd. The sun was shining, birds were chirping, kegs were getting iced down, tap systems were being assembled. It was a beautiful thing.

Initially given a chance to walk around and do some pre-event sampling of the different brews, we eventually settled in to our volunteer assignments in order to receive the mass of people that would be arriving excited and ready to drink.

View of the crowd while pouring
from the Mad River booth

While my buddies manned the Mad River Brewing booth, I was assigned wristband duty at one of the entrance gates. This meant I got to enthusiastically greet an eclectic stream of beer lovers as they entered Gate Number 2 on the way to beer euphoria. Ticketholders covered in tattoos, sporting preppy polos, rocking Big Lebowski tee shirts, and wearing homemade pretzel necklaces eagerly presented their ID, got a wristband and made their way into the Square.

Once the flow of entrants died down, I went and joined up with my friends at the Mad River brewery booth. The scene was controlled chaos, as my buddies juggled the many duties of beer pourer: explaining the available choices, pouring, cracking fresh bottles, throwing away empties, restocking ice buckets with more bottles to chill. They were happy to have me step in and lend a hand to what had been a non stop flow of drinkers since the gates opened.

Behind the scenes look

Mad River, a brewery out of Blue Lake California, featured bottles of their Steelhead Extra Pale Ale, Jamaica Sunset IPA, Steelhead Double IPA and Jamaica Red Ale. All four beers were very good for their style, giving our audience a nice variety to choose from.

As the beer supply ran low and the afternoon session drew to a close, we cleaned up our booth and made our way back out to the volunteer area. All three of us were still riding a wave of adrenaline. This yeah though, it was not from having unlimited access to all the beer we could stomach, but from observing, interacting and serving other beer lovers who got as much joy out of the festival as we have in previous years.

It's tough to beat the satisfaction that comes with drinking good beer, but sharing good beer took our appreciation of the beverage to another level.

Top notch Volunteers