World of Warcraft Brewfest

Alliance Brewfest Camp at Ironforge

It's that time of year again. Personally, my favorite WoW holiday, Brewfest is here. The festival runs from September 20 until October 5 which mostly coincides with Oktoberfest (9/17-10/3) this year. As with the real celebration, beers and games abound. I mostly play Alliance therefore most of my tips will be directed to that faction. You can check out the full guide to everything Brewfest over at Wowhead.

Horde Brewfest Camp at Orgrimmar

There are prizes that you can buy with Brewfest Prize Tokens. The first day you can earn over 100 Brewfest Tokens easily by doing all available quests.  Each day after that you should be able to earn at least 30 Tokens by doing the Brewfest Dailies.  A few of items you'll want to make sure to buy over others, so that you will be able to complete the Brewmaster Achievement, if your into that sort of thing. Just keep in mind that Brewfest is required for the What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been Achievement that awards the dragon mount granted by the Reins of the Violet Proto-Drake.

The component Achievements required for Brewmaster

• The Brewfest Diet - You can buy all of these food from vendors at the Brewfest camp.
• Does Your Wolpertinger Linger? - Get drunk, or wear the beer goggles, and throw your net on the Wolpertingers.  This is easily done near the Brewfest camp. If you collect companion pets then you'll definitely want to do this one because you get the Wolpertinger's Tankard as a reward.
• Brew of the Month - costs 200 Tokens, bought at either Blix Fixwidget (Horde) or Belbi Quikswitch (Alliance)
• Down With The Dark Iron -  You get this for completing This One Time, When I Was Drunk... (see below)
• Have Keg, Will Travel - You can either buy hops (get the 2 token cheap ones) from the token vendor or win a Brewfest mount from the boss Coren Direbrew.

• Direbrewfest - This is a quest to kill the boss of Brewfest, Coren Direbrew (Lvl 85 Elite).  He is in Blackrock Depths but after flying there and spending a while in the actual instance I couldn't find him.  You can simply join the battle in the Dungeon Finder however. He was very easy in my opinion and awards one of 8 ilevel 365 items, mostly trinkets.  I fought him about 6 times in a random party.  Luckily, I won both his Bitterer Balebrew Charm and the Brawler's Trophy for my Pally. There was a guy there that said he fought 40 times before he finally won the Coren's Chilled Chromium Coaster.  I saw it drop twice.  The first time you kill him each day, Coren also drops a Keg-Shaped Treasure Chest which may contain rarer drops like the Swift Brewfest Ram and the Great Brewfest Kodo.

The Dailies

• Brew For Brewfest: Awards 2 Tokens per turn-in. This is a continuation quest.
• Horde There and Back Again
• Alliance There and Back Again

I like to think of these quests as ram racing. Just remember to run close to the apple barrels, located to the left of the path heading towards Kharanos and also directly behind the quest giver and the barrel thrower, so that your mount fatigue stays low.

• Horde Bark for Drohn's Distillery! or Bark for T'chali's Voodoo Brewery!
• Alliance Bark for the Barleybrews! or Bark for the Thunderbrews!

You get to pick one per day; it really doesn't matter which. You basically run in a circuit through your given faction's city advertising the brewers' beer.  All you have to do is run the circuit on the ram mount and return in the allotted 4 minutes.  I like to do Thunderbrew simply because I can jump down from the road pretty much straight onto their tent on the return trip.

• Horde This One Time, When I Was Drunk...
• Alliance This One Time, When I Was Drunk...

This is the "main" battle of Brewfest. It is the Dark Iron invasion of the Brewfest camp which occurs every 30 minutes during the festival. Pretty easy really; you just pick up beer mugs from the nearby table and chunk them at the baddie. You don't actually need to participate in the battle. Afterwards, a big gear will remain on the ground in the center of the Brewfest tents. Just click it and enjoy a painless quest reward at others' expense.

Star Wars Birthday Cake!

Tada! So was it worth waiting almost a week for your surprise?

See, the Gremlins can't wait for the Lightsabers. The blue and green weren't even "cracked" yet.

Yes, I know I said it would be "tomorrow" but time is just relative after all, right? No? I, uh, got held hostage? OK, really, I was brought in on a super secret multi-governmental spy mission.  Now, you must all die...FINE. Honestly, I dislocated my jaw and didn't feel like typing up a blog post. You'll like this one though.  I mean who doesn't like Star Wars? Nope, La La La, I don't hear you.

Here's the deal.  My nephew wanted a Yoda cake for his birthday. By the time he could walk my family was plotting to turn this innocent child into a member of the Nerd Army.  We succeeded, BWHAHAHA.  Being as I am the go-to cake person in the family I was tasked with making this happen. Well...simply put, I didn't feel like expending the time and energy needed to make a Yoda cake.  [Read: I am lazy.] Therefore, my favorite, and only, nephew got a Star Wars cake instead. Here's the blow by blow, edited for your viewing pleasure of course.

Step 1 - Bake a cake to the specifications of an 8 year old. →  "I want sprinkles inside" OK, confetti cake. "No, SPRINKLES - INSIDE" *sigh* OK, vanilla right? [now imagine the voice of someone speaking to something dumb and really slow (like a slug, or a rock)] "No Aunt, VANILLA BEAN, NOT plain VANILLA" *double sigh* What kind of icing, vanilla buttercream? "ummm, Lemon." What?! Have you ever had lemon icing? "Yes." And, you liked it? "Yes." OK. (yeah right)

Step 2 - Flip the hot cake (white, vanilla bean, confetti) out onto an aluminum foil-covered piece of cardboard while praying to the Cake Gods that when you flip it out of the pan the cake actually comes out instead of just hanging there, stuck, and then falling into 2 or 3 chunks.  Let cake cool.  Why cardboard you ask? Because my stupid, freaking, stupid, &@$#%, cake carrier was in my car - in another state. 

Beautiful

Step 3 - Make 4 cups vanilla buttercream, not lemon, frosting. Dye two-thirds blue and the rest black. Google antidote for transdermal poisoning.

Step 4: Pop the heads off of several Pez dispensers. Eat all of the Pez candy like a depraved crack addict, saving none for the kids.

Step 5: Mangle some perfectly good, holographic notepads.

yay for the $1 Target bins

Step 6: Charge the nerdy men with creating Lightsabers using only glowsticks, duct tape, and Sharpies.

Step 7: Use the Force, Luke (and everyone else).

Notice the cake carrier?  Yeah, that was fun to move.

Step 8: Travel 100 miles and convince children that eating melted wax will not KILL them. Geez, when I was your age we ate cakes made out of dirt and rocks, decorated with acorns and twigs.

Cruising Charlie

Surprises for tomorrow!  Today you get Charlie's ears flapping in the wind.