This weekend the annual Whisky Fair in Limburg an der Lahn was happening again. Although I’ve been planning to go for years, there was always something preventing me from going there. Usually fun stuff, luckily. This year I could finally go and I booked everything ahead (which usually isn’t all that necessary). 4 Months before the festival all hotels with websites were fully booked so we ended up in a neighboring village.

The hotel room was a trip to history, right back to 1975, but everything was clean and neat, so I was satisfied with that. Because of the Fair, the taxis were all booked and the traffic was too thick for buses to get through, so we walked the 3 miles to Limburg. As it happened it was about 25 degrees C outside, which means we were all sweaty by the time we got there. We stopped for lunch and a Hefeweize first. A great start to a great weekend!

At the festival we met loads of familiar people from the Usquebaugh Society and tasted quite a few drams (those will be blogged about tomorrow). Of course we walked around to inventory all stands while having a few whiskies here and there. We had about 5 hours to fill at the festival and that was enough for me. We walked out at some point to enjoy an ice cream. That was a first at a whisky festival!

The festival itself is nicely set up. Of course there were some jams at some point during the afternoon, but that is bound to happen with whisky lovers moving in flocks. Usually it was pretty okay to get to a stand, choose your dram and get them. Not too crowded.

There were many collectors there, which meant quite a few old and rare bottles to be tasted. I think there were probably more bottles that were no longer available in shops than there were modern bottling.

In the evening there was a Bruichladdich BBQ, at which you could get sausages and steaks accompanied by a couple of Bruichladdich drams. Unfortunately there were about 200 people there, so it was quite impossible for the presenters to get over the din to explain what there were doing there. Also unfortunately, one of the drams was the Laddie 10 (good, but not new), a cask sample of Chateau D’Yquem Bruichladdich (new but far from good) and a random cask of Port Charlotte (‘meh’ in this case). Having a couple of beers at the Irish Pub in town made up for it though.