Costumes, Kilts and Beer

Hi all,

We have literally had a ball the other weekend. The extended revelry started Thursday at 3pm with the Speights Brewery Tour with Cadbury Chocolate pairing and naming contest. Generally the Speights brewery tour is a delightful tour in and of itself. But since it was Cadbury week here in Dunedin they decided to do a little combo event. The tour was your basic brewery tour, in essence, an extended sales pitch with the basics of the beer making thrown in. (For those beer purists out there, I'm pretty sure Speights doesn't follow the German purity laws - our first stop was where they add in all the sugar) But at the tasting part of the tour they combined the tasting of their range of 7 beers with about a dozen of Cadbury's finest chocolates. Yum and Double yum!

Here's our tour guide Jane

Did you know that a Hogshead, Half-Hogshead, Barrel, Kilderkin, Butt and Pin are all types of beer kegs

So they made the mistake of allowing us to pour our own beers. Here's Drea's turn behind the tap.

Here's my turn.

Here's the result of too many rounds of pour your own.

As part of the tasting they were having a naming contest for the chocolate beer pairings. They have beers like Old Dark and it was paired with some Cadbury Old Gold and the suggested name was "Old Favorites" (I know, no wonder they were having a naming contest). The prize for best name for each pair got a $50 gift certificate at the gift shop. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Friday night after work was the night of the Ball. After visiting the Larnach Castle on the Peninsula back during my parents visit we found out about the Larnach Castle winter ball. They decorated the ballroom in Victorian splendor and invited about 200 folks to attend in their finest Victorian costumes. The festivities included the dancing to called dances with Scottish Folk band accompaniment, dinner and the traditional Address of the Haggis (tastes like meaty stuffing, and not altogether horrible) where the host recited this poem by Robert Burns (didn't make sense when he recited it aloud either).

The Address of the Haggis

We'd reserved our costumes about 2 months ago and hadn't really given a lot of thought to "Victorian Costume". We were told on the invitation to go to a costume shop in town that would take care of us. Long story short, any one with the slightest bit of fashion history knowledge will see from the pictures that my costume is decidedly not "Victorian". (In fact, when we returned it, we realized the costume was titled "medieval prince" - only about 400 hundred years off. But men's style's are timeless, Right???)

Wrong.

Please note all the appropriately dressed attendees.

We also ran into our tour guide from Thursday's brewery tour! Small town eh?

At least we found someone else that went to the same costume shop.

But poor fashion sense aside we had a great time. The food was excellent, albeit a bit on the late side, and the called dances were great fun. Here's a video I took of one of the dances. I think this one was before the caller had had too many beers and started messing up the calls.

I think it's hard to look good doing this dance regardless how good you are at it.

When we got home we had a bit of fun with our costumes. Here's a couple videos of us being silly...

Drea thought I looked like a russian dancer (and it's true, I'm getting old)

I thought she looked like a vampire (scary!!!)

Then on Saturday night, after all this revelry, Dave's company had their own costumed night out on the town. We had our winter drinks and dinner at the Scottish restaurant next to the train station. The theme of the evening was Braveheart. Drea was a little partied out from the preivous two days (plus they would've charged us $50 for her to attend. I know, booo!) so she stayed home and studied. I borrowed a kilt from a friend of mine but didn't decide to spring for the face paint or the giant sword so my costume was pretty bland compared to the night before. Here are a couple pics from the evening...

The guy to my right came dressed in drag in a costume that made no sense. Only for the truly brave of heart, I guess.

More to come on Dave's weekend away planting trees coming soon.

Love to all,

Dave and Andrea