The Collegian

Issue date: 11/5/09 Section: Down the Hill

Media Credit: Maria Schmitt

It was a blustery fall day in downtown Detroit at the Eastern Market two Saturdays ago.

Detroit's answer for Oktoberfest, "Beer Week," had rocked Motown for the last six days with beer-eccentric events held throughout the city. This Saturday morning was its Grand Finale: the Inaugural Harvest Festival.

The city, notorious for crime from top to bottom, seemed happy, almost welcoming - a feeling inner city Detroit has never impressed upon me outside a stadium or opera house.

A good-natured local rap artist wearing a dirty yellow puff jacket and a loose stocking cap free-styled for our gang of five anxious beer testers, and asked if we wanted to buy his CD. We obliged and handed him a crumpled-up dollar bill - it was the first time I didn't mind playing along with the homless hustle.

Detroit's Eastern market was founded in the 1850s and is the largest historic public market district in the United States.

Here private vendors, such as this man, use the market historically known for its massive array of fresh produce and meats as a launching point for all sorts of Michigan businesses.

Walking toward the festival, the aroma of fresh pretzel bread attracts me to a shed selling Zingerman's products, an Ann Arbor delicatessen named one of the top 25 food markets in the world by "Food and Wine Magazine."

As I purchase a mini-loaf of pretzel bread and relish the warmth of the portable ovens behind the counter, my group hastily presses on hardly noticing the thousands of vendors that all together sell about 70,000 tons of fresh produce each year.

Then I remember: today is not a fruit day; it is a beer day.

At the festival's lot, four lines of white tents set up in a square form a concrete courtyard. Festival goers huddled in the shallow tent space not used by the beer vendors for about an hour, when the alcohol insulated their bodies enough to enjoy the exposed elements: a sporadic light rain mixed with flurries of wind.

Each of the 40 microbreweries and brewpubs are set behind a row of tables at the back of each connected tent.

It's cold; so we rush through the gate flashing our IDs and tickets and accept our 15 allotted tokens and tasting glasses with a three ounce lines marked on the side.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools