Forecastle Festival – From Erica

Thom’s EatDrinkPlayLove from Forecastle went up yesterday, and as promised, here’s my alternate perspective on the same subject. (For the record, we made our picks separately, and I didn’t change mine after I read his.)

Eat:

Generally speaking, food truck goodness. There are food trucks, and there are the general festival food stands. Most of the time, I find the trucks more reliably good. That said, my absolute favorite thing I ate this year was the Tatanka sausage, which came from the food stands. Its a buffalo sausage covered in pepper mix and grilled onions.

Drink:

In the Bourbon Tent. Thom listed this as his Play; but I like beer but love whiskey, so for me, Bourbon Tent is The Way to Drink at Forecastle. The tickets and entry to the tent are a bit pricey, but a cool place to hang out in the middle of the day is worth quite a bit. And being friendly with the bar tenders can sometimes stretch your ticket value. There are a lot of festivals in the world; part of what keeps me coming back to Forecastle is its deep sense of place. The history of Louisville just outside; the bridges looming over the stages; barges going down the river just feet from the festival. Bourbon is the local drink and the final touch on that sense of place. If your experience is limited to Jack and Jim, Forecastle Bourbon Tent can fix that right up.

Honorable mentions – the Close Call Kolsch. Gamescom in Cologne has taught me that Kolsch is the taste of cool, and the trick also works at Forecastle. For non-alcoholic options, try Yerba Mate at the Forecastle Foundation tent, or basically anything at Heine Brothers Coffee (but especially cucumber lemonade and icebergs.)

Play:

Black Pistol Fire or Seratones. Get a recording of either; press play.

I said before that the headliners weren’t as strong as usual for me this year, but I hoped to discover something new. These two were the first bands I saw at festival open, and in the end they were my favorites. Ironically, Seratones is from Shreveport and Black Pistol Fire are from Austin, so debateably I traveled a long way from Dallas to see them.

Love:

For me, again, its all the festival style. I’ve done some eyerolling at very impractical/too glamorous for the setting/clearly not comfortable festival fashion before, but its an interesting thing to me to watch what people wear, and to find people who have put together things that are so clearly right for them and fit into their environment well. I like the amateur anthropology of observing what’s caught on and what’s new (flower crowns were annoyingly standard last year, but basically gone this year..) and I like how asking for a photo takes me out of my comfortable space. It makes me be more outgoing than I would normally be, and it reminds me how easily a little compliment can make someone a little happier.

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