The Taste of Hamburg-er Festival

Today we decided to go to the Taste of Hamburg-er Festival. This took place in downtown Hamburg, PA. How, you might ask, did we decide to do this? I decided a food festival would be fun. The labor day weekend has so many fairs and festivals going on. So I googled food festivals Pennsylvania and this came up. It just sounded to much fun (and odd) to pass up. The paper 'program' said this was the 7th annual festival. So anyway after my 15 mile run with USAFIt/Philly we headed out there. (Yes I took a shower first!)

The festival is a lot like the street festivals that happen in Media. In fact, one of the streets it was on was State Street :). It is spread over three streets and about 5 blocks total. There were some bands; one was pretty good! There were some boardwalk style games. And lots and lots and lots of hamburger vendors. People could vote for their favorite burger. I think to do that properly though one would have to sample ALL the burgers. That just wasn't going to happen though.

I have to say this place smelled soooooooo good. Hamburgers cooking on grills, fried onions, french fries, funnel cake.... Fortunately we had stopped at Wawa on the way out and so I could grab a container of milk to drink on the way out. That stalled my post run hunger enough that we could walk each of the streest to decided what burger we wanted to try.

First the one we didnt try but was by far the most intriguing. A cheeseburger on a toasted glazed donut! It was called the Luther. Dave settled on a toasted cheese burger. This was a toasted cheese sandwich wrapped around a hamburger. He had it with fried onions.

I wanted to go back to the bbq truck where they only had two offerings. My choice was the grizzly which was a burger with bbq beef on top. We waited in a long line for both burgers. However, in my case by the time we got to the top of the line they were out of bbq beef and were no longer selling that burger. So I settled for what they called the Kodiak. Which was basically a bacon cheeseburger. But it was a very good bacon cheeseburger.

The highlight though was the tin cups we got with soda. These came from a stand selling old fashioned sodas out of barrels. The choices were orange-cream, birch beer, root beer, sasparilla and black cherry. Dave had birch beer. I wanted to try sasparilla but they were out so I had black cherry. All I really wanted was the tin cup which I really thought was cool. However, it held 32 ounces of soda which is more soda than I drink in a month (or two) so I had a few drinks and poured the rest down a drain.

According to the program there was also a mooing contest which I guess we missed. There was a hamburger eating contest which we missed on purpose but you should have seen the crowed gathered around to watch!

Today is a gorgeous day so we (of course) took the long way home and had a really nice ride!