Fremont Oktoberfest: We Drink A $21 Forty

Sunday afternoon turned out to be a terrific time to hit the Fremont Oktoberfest: at one o' clock it was still gray and cloudy and the crowds hadn't arrived. For $5 extra, we ended up with a total of eight tokens, good for eight 5-oz. pours.

Our initial plan was to drink anything that was named "Oktoberfest," but there were only two Oktoberfest beers that weren't tapped out (or called Beck's): Lang Creek's Oktoberfest and Skagit River's Huntsmans Oktoberfest. The back-up plan, then, was to drink at companies we hadn't heard of, and then switch to beers we hadn't had before from companies we knew. (Here's the list of breweries.)

We weren't taking notes, but New Belgium's 1554 Enlightened Black Ale was remarkable anyway, as was Victory Brewing Co.'s HopDevil Ale. Beer vendors, we believe, are some of the nicest, most informative people on earth.

That concludes the fun part of the Fremont Oktoberfest, which was also home of some head-scratchingly idiotic planning designed -- so far as we can tell -- to remove any resemblance to an actual Oktoberfest. You'd think an Oktoberfest would be all about the beer-and-brats, but this one had beer-less food areas and food-less beer gardens...AND NO PRETZELS! The food court consisted of a single bratwurst cart, a Kenyan food cart, fruit-on-a-stick, vitamin water, and Naked Juice. You could take your food inside the beer garden, but there were all of three tables to sit at.

While we were sitting on a curb, trying to eat our exploding spicy-pork-and-cheese brat, no less than three dogs launched at us, face-height, in a way their asshat owners thought was cute. "He loves mustard!" "Oh, he's gonna eat your scraps there!" "Hope you like dogs!" Christ, the ratio was half dogs, half people. What a terrific idea, to come down to a crowded public drinking space with something on a leash. As if we didn't have enough to worry about stumbling over in the first place.

We don't spend that much time in Fremont outside of Brouwer's, but this showy dog-infestation persuaded us that the once-populist, blue-collar neighborhood is circling the urban-chic drain anyway, and we can't be missing much. Since Brouwer's was right there, and since we were still trying to forget our experience with the Oktoberfest's grease-brick called "curly fries," we capped off the afternoon with the "large" Hoegaarden and some fries with curry ketchup. In retrospect, probably could have made that a small.