The drinks were great (all the usual suspects I love to see in a summer festival lineup), but the tacos stole the show this year.
Thank you to Coco Vodka for inviting me.
We’re in that peak summer sampling season, or peak summer festival season rather, where there is a different version of this at the Peony Forum seemingly every week, and I absolutely love it.
I appreciate the photo on the way in with the giant archway. I am a sucker for the walk-in wow moment, so the first impression when you walk in the door, and they made a very strong one.
As for attire, everybody’s just wearing regular summer clothes.
For entertainment, they’ve got a stage set up with a performer. There actually were people dancing in front of the stage at multiple points in the afternoon that I was there, which is lovely to see. Very good energy, so bravo to the organizers for that.
There was a very eclectic mix of beverage providers here. There was a lot that I haven’t seen before and a whole lot of different, very interesting beers within those unique niche suppliers. It’s nice when you actually get the opportunity to try some different things.
I’m on record as being partial to anything all-inclusive when it comes to festivals, so I had negative points in my book for needing to purchase drink tokens. If you haven’t been to this type of festival before, there’s kind of two schools of thought when it comes to sampling festivals: there is camp one where you pay a higher ticket price and all of the samples are included and you just walk around getting your samples, then there is camp two where you purchase drink tokens and each different table will get to choose how many drink tokens their sample is worth. Oftentimes these places will include, with your ticket, a certain number of samples included. I do not like those as much. I understand the need for it, but I don’t love it as much, so I would prefer if it was the other direction, but c’est la vie.
I thought that the activations set up at the back of the festival grounds were my favourite, and I tip my hat to the team at Olé Tequila for a really great activation set up on the back patio. It felt lush. It felt intentional. It felt established.
They had really positive, smiley, happy brand ambassadors who greeted me the second that I walked by. They had something which I love to see, which is lots of seating areas for people to hang around. They actually had good photo ops for people to be able to work with, so I thought they really did a job and they were my best in show for the day.
My best bite of the day was a tossup between any of the six different tacos that I got. They really had some absolutely fantastic taco suppliers.