Brats, brews and a good time too: Happy Harry's Pork & Brew returns to the Alerus
Jan. 21—GRAND FORKS — Ingenue brewers and Grand Forks' international standing counted among the winners of the annual Happy Harry's Pork and Brew, held Saturday evening at the Alerus Center.
Attendees were greeted by 12 food stands and 51 brewers, beating the more than 40 brew vendors featured the year before, Alerus Center director of Marketing Toryn Jones told the Herald. The bacon vendors alone collectively cooked up some 1,000 pounds of meat, Alerus Center district general manager Anna Rosburg wrote in an email.
"Last year was good. This year is better," Jones said.
If the vendors had grown, they were more than matched by a hungry crowd. All 500 VIP tickets sold out the week before, Jones said; another 2,500 tickets general admission tickets were up for sale and still selling as of Saturday afternoon.
All tickets included beer, cider and seltzer and food samples and ample free bacon. VIP ticket holders got to show up 90 minutes early, and got exclusive access to a BLT bar and Bloody Mary bar.
Smith and Love Six-String Circus and the Jimmy River Band provided musical accompaniment.
Megan Werven, owner of Something Sweet, was worried just 20 minutes past general admission at 5 p.m. whether she'd have enough bacon-wrapped, Fulton-braised bratwurst (topped with Serrano honey mustard) to make it to 8 p.m.
"We're getting a lot of seconds and a lot of thirds," she observed.
Even the new kids on the block were seeing good business. Stephen Miller of Bear Arms Brewing Company said their first-time brewing stand was "swamped" as they dished out their standard Liberty Lager as well as a new double breakfast stout, dubbed Zero Dark Thirty.
He reported the brewers had seen runaway success since debuting Liberty Lager on Veterans Day last year.
"It's been crazy." Miller said. "We sold out of our first batch in a little over a month."
Stefan Reimer drove two hours from Cando, North Dakota, to attend the Alerus Center event.
Born and raised in Germany, Reimer was a venerable beer connoisseur, having logged some 733 beers tasted in the last two-and-a-half years. Saturday's event was a welcome break from the mass-produced light beers that dominated his local liquor store.
"Busch Light, Coors Light, Bud Light — we Germans, we believe that's enhanced water," he said. "This is fantastic, in the country, to have this."
Across the floor, at the annual bacon-eating contest, returning champion Robb Fletcher of Winnipeg again claimed victory.
His posse of bacon-shirt clad of interlopers from the Great White North, the self-dubbed Canadian Bacon, had already taken to calling him the Comeback Kid, since he'd checked out of the hospital at 7 a.m. that morning after partying too hard the night before.
"I don't think it made a difference either way," he reported in a post-game interview.
Canadian Bacon in fact has been a feature of the Alerus Center event going back to 2018. People stop them to pose for pictures, and then show them the pictures they took with Canadian Bacon years before.
"This is awesome," Fletcher said. "You get all this support. It's a boys weekend, and we have a lot of fun."
