The Grocery and Broad Street Brewhaha

I had just settled into the recliner for the 11:00 games when I got a call from Burge to meet up with Mims for lunch (apparently calling people by their last names stuck, even after college). Mims was here for what seemed like the 10th time in the past 4 months to do “research” for Saveur, and since grilled fish doesn’t reheat well, I decided to skip the leftover grilled cobia and smoked red snapper tacos we made the night before, and take them up on the poboys at The Grocery on St. Charles.

After scanning through the handwritten menu on the chalkboard, I decided to go with the New Orleans style roast beef poboy. The sandwich lived up to the “New Orleans style” nomenclature. I’m still not sure how or why, but excessive gravy and mayonnaise forms a ridiculously awesome and artery clogging sauce on French bread. As I was finishing off the last few bites with a much needed fork and wandering why I didn’t get my sloppy poboy pressed (The Grocery’s specialty), I heard something I was not expecting to hear.

I’m usually on top of things when it comes to the ins and outs of the goings-on in New Orleans, so when Burge said something about a free beer festival in Mid-City, I was about as confused as Henry Rowengartner when Chet Stedman gave him in-game advice during the Giants game. Between habitually checking out GoNOLA.com, snagging a copy of The Gambit at Rouse’s, and clicking on the Internet Explorer favorites tab that take me to the guys over at Blackened Out and The Beer Buddha, I feel like I always have a halfway decent notion of the happenings throughout the city- especially the free and cheap ones. We drove through Central City, and finally made it to Broad. Even though Burge’s cousin was working the festival for Lazy Magnolia, we didn’t have any real directions. If we wouldn’t have spotted the oversized, inflatable Abita bottle, we would have never found the festival. As we pulled into the overgrown parking lot of a rundown and abandoned grocery store, we began to wander what we had gotten ourselves into. After we followed the crowd up a ramp to a hidden parking lot on top of the sketchy building, we finally caught glimpses of what lied ahead. As we walked under a sign that read “Broad Street Brewhaha” and fixed our eyes on the beer tents and trailers, I began to feel better than Julie Gaffney did when she made the game winning save against Gunner Stahl.

After sampling pints of NOLA Irish Channel Stout and Abita’s new release in their Select series, Rye Pale Ale, we set up shop at the Lazy Magnolia booth. While sampling an Indian Summer or two, I began to reminisce about being the first person to track down Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan in Starkville and people looking at me crazily when I pulled out the party pig. If only I could get paid to talk about beer, especially a Mississippi brewery all day.

We finally drug ourselves away from the Lazy Magnolia tent and Mid-City and headed back Uptown. As if we hadn’t gotten our fill of local craft beer already, we made a detour by Breaux Mart for a party pig of NOLA Blonde. We emptied the miniature keg by the time the Alabama- Mississippi State game (if you watched it, then you know why). With an empty keg and more sorrows to drown, we walked over to The Bulldog for a few pitchers of Dead Guy Ale, which were very appropriate for our degrading state of consciousness. From what I can recollect, the rest of the night was set in the French Quarter, and involved some whipping of the hair back and forth, and a 4 mile walk.