It's time for another episode of... Pros and Cons! Pro: Great potential. People who love beer, bacon, and music should be able to find something they like at this event and enjoy their passions. The website is clean and informative, and the festival includes alot of great ideas. An all-you-can-eat bacon bar? Over 100 beers to try? Bands spanning multiple music genres playing every hour of the day? Sounds awesome Con: In order to enjoy these things, you had to enter the fairgrounds through one of three entrances, where festival-goers had to show IDs and receive bracelets, a map, and a tasting glass. Sounds simple, but the event coordinators failed to account for the fact that everyone would show up around noon to get in. Well, if you showed up late, you had to wait an hour in a line around the block. We arrived around 12:30 and didn't enter until 1:43. And at a festival that is only 6 hours long, that is approximately 1/6th of the 1-day pass wasted. There are multiple ways to avoid this (staggered entrance, better venue, open gates earlier, more staff, more entrances), but no one thought of this and people were VERY upset. Pro: Once we were in, the BEER was flowing. Many choice local, regional, and national beers. You would wait in line for a brewery for maybe 2-3 minutes, and then get to the front and choose which variety you wanted, tossing a coin into a bucket for donation to a charity. You would get maybe 3-4oz of beer in your tasting glass (larger glass for VIPs) and then wait in another line while you sampled one variety. Many breweries handed out coasters, and it was a festive, fun time. Con: The BACON bar was very poorly planned. What was advertised? An all-you-can-eat bacon bar with 2 tons of different varieties of bacon to satisfy bacon lovers. Now, a pound of bacon is about 15 pieces of thin-cut bacon, so assuming 1-ton per day, that is 30,000 pieces of bacon for the day. The problem? They couldn't cook it fast enough. There was a 15-minute wait in a long line to get to the bacon bar, and when you got there, there were 4 empty buffet trays and one tray of applewood-smoked bacon being shoveled carelessly into paper trays, along with some pork rinds and a sauce bar. I got 3 pieces of 1 variety of bacon and two pork rinds. There was your 'all-you-can-eat' bacon bar. Pro: The MUSIC portion was decent. After missing the first two bands waiting in line outside the festival, we did enjoy the Rockaway Beach Boys (a Ramones cover band) and local garage-folk band Skribe. I can't speak to the Sunday bands, but we liked both the bands we heard. I even looked up Skribe on ReverbNation later. Cons: A few other bummers. The cigar patio ran out of cigars when we were 10 places back in line, but we didn't even know that was an option until we saw the map. The bacon a la carte options for sale (candies, jams, desserts, and entrees) were lacking, a very poor overall selection, though we did enjoy our chili dog from Volt. The ticket price did NOT cover parking, and the beer tents were so packed together it was difficult to navigate the grounds; they could have spread the tents out. Overall, I don't think I would come back. Great vision, but they need to hire someone who has run an event before to think of problems before they happen. Better venue, more execution for the bacon bar, better system for screening IDs, and a better experience for the $45 price. read more