Bottle Share at Han Dynasty

This past Sunday, Mat from PhillyBeerScene and Jared from PhillyTapFinder presented their third bottle share. I made it to the first one, but missed the second, so I was excited to be able to make it this time. Each time it's been held somewhere different, too, and the 3rd was being held at Han Dynasty in Old City, a place I've heard a lot about but never been.

To spread out the crowd a bit this time, they split up each table to hold a couple styles. Things like 'Stouts & Porters', 'American Wild Ales', 'IPAs', etc. Considering the way the room was setup, this was a real good idea. When I arrived, not much was on the tables yet.

See, just a few bottles sitting around, all lonely. Luckily things shaped up with tons of other stuff being dropped off as more people showed up. For whatever reason, probably since I love them, I have more pictures of the Stouts & Porters table than the others. Here's it near the beginning as well.

But after a while, that became this.

Pretty sure it was even more crowded near the end. Not too surprising as stouts are generally fairly popular at tastings like this. Of course, Jared made a table labeled only as 'Other' so that ended up the most crowded, but really that's cheating so I'll just ignore it.

Time passed, I sampled things and talked with people. Here's someone checking out one of the tables, trying to decide what to drink.

I unfortunately don't have any good pictures of the crowd, but it got nice and busy. About fifty five people ended up showing up in the end which was nearly perfect for the size of the space. I met lots of new people, too, which is one of the cool things about this event. Since anyone can come up until the RSVP limit, you get a nice random set of people each time. Still have a lot of regulars, too, but there are plenty of new ones on top of us.

Lucky for me, I drank exactly the right amount this time. My favorite sample of the day may have been Cantillon Fou' Foune, but I've had that before so I knew what to expect (it's awesome). I had quite a bit more, too many to track really, but people did a great job with their selections. Lots of real interesting stuff. Plus, the food was delicious and plentiful. Some of it was real spicy too which is a thing at Han Dynasty. Definitely looking forward to the next one!