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Brewfest extended by two days
Hot off the forums comes word from Bornaak that Brewfest, that celebration of things like drinking, throwing mugs at invaders, and killing an unwashed Dark Iron Dwarf in hopes that he drops a kodo has been extended two days to October 5th. If, like me, you've been farming him for days only to pass the Kodo to your wife because, well, you love her and want her to be happy (and also you know you're doomed if you don't) then you'll celebrate additional chances to whack him in hopes of Kodo. Or deadly beer stein. Or maybe you just like doing Ram Riding, or got a late start on your tickets. Whatever the reason we can all celebrate the extension of this, our yearly excuse to go back to BRD and kill a dwarf to steal his lucky cha... er, I mean trinkets. Now get cracking, make every second of those two extra days count. Complete your Achievements, get your loots, whatever you need you have more time.
Breakfast Topic: It's Brewfest Time
Good Morning, and welcome to Brewfest, everyone! All aspiring Brewmasters, brush off your Ram riding skills and prepare for some fun. If you need a refresher on how to race those Rams, check out our Ram racing tips from last year. This will be one of your main sources of tokens, so you'll want to make sure you're good at it. For a quick rundown of how to get each achievement, you can read up on our Overachiever's guide to the 2009 Brewfest.
August's Brew of the Month: Draenic Pale Ale
It's a new month, which means it's time for a new brew. August's Brew of the Month is Draenic Pale Ale, the final brew in the series of 12 brews. We've seen every last one of them now, starting with Binary Brew, through Izzard's Ever Flavor and Blackrock Lager, and now we end with the Draenic Pale Ale.When you drink this brew, you'll start seeing pink elephants. It doesn't happen every time, but pretty close to it. More rarely, you'll get to ride a pink elephant as you see in the video above. It lasts about thirty seconds, which is a bit longer than the Parading Elephants that just follow you around. I don't know about you guys, but if a giant neon pink elephant appeared under me after drinking a beer, I'm pretty sure I would swear off alcohol for life. Seriously. Talk about psychological trauma.
July's Brew of the Month: Stranglethorn Brew
It's July 1st, which means you can head out to Nagrand and pick up your free gems the nearest mailbox and pick up this month's brew, assuming you have a Brew of the Month membership! This month we have the Stranglethorn Brew, which is certainly more interesting than the various "teehee you farted/burped/barfed/burped again" brews. Upon drinking the Stranglethorn Brew, you get a buff called Jungle Madness! Exclamation point included. It causes your character to hallucinate for awhile, and be attacked by spectral Jungle Gnomes. If you don't have a Brew of the Month membership, you can watch a video from Wowhead poster VBub that shows the brew in action at the end of this post. Just click the 'read more' link at the bottom. Assuming they don't change the brews for next year, our beertastic journey will be coming to an end pretty soon. There's only one brew left that we haven't seen, which is the Draenic Pale Ale. After that, we're back to the Binary Brew unless they decide to put out a whole new batch of 12 brews, and I somehow doubt that will happen. Is anybody else hoping the Draenic Pale Ale is truly epic, considering it marks the entire year we've been drinking these crazy things?
June's Brew of the Month: Blackrock Lager
It's the beginning of a new month, which means a new brew! This time around it's the Blackrock Lager! This is a hot hot hot beverage to kick off the summer season. Drinking the Lager sometimes procs something that sounds like it should be a Mage talent: Internal Combustion. While you have this buff (which lasts 5 minutes), your face gives off an eerie red glow like you're seeping fire out of every orifice. Except that one. And that one. Okay, you people are gross. Just the ones above the neck. After 5 minutes (or when you click off the buff), you get what you see in the image above. You belch a great load of fire! And that's it. Pretty straightforward. I always try to find little factoids about the various brews these are based on, but a lager is common enough that I don't think it's necessary or interesting to anybody but beer buffs. Instead, I'm going to point out how awesome some of the Blackrock/Dark Iron themed brews are. This one makes you belch fire, but there's also the Dark Iron Ale that you can use to get a pet from the Darkmoon Faire, and the Sulfuron Slammer which creative individuals use to break crowd control effects cast upon them in PvP. The best of the lot is the Dire Brew, which turns you into a Dark Iron Dwarf for an hour. Awesome? Yes, I think so. You can get all of them in Blackrock Depths, so go celebrate in the Grim Guzzler sometime this week!
May's Brew of the Month: Springtime Stout
It's a new month and the new brew is here! May's Brew of the Month is a very simple Springtime Stout with a familiar side effect. When you drink one of your drinks, you have a chance to proc the buff called 'Flower Child.' The buff only lasts ten seconds or so, and as you run around with the buff, flowers pop up underfoot. Herbalists, you've seen something like this before.I try to give little factoids on the real life brews some of these are named after (such as the fact that Pilsners shouldn't exist in Azeroth), but stouts aren't very exotic, overall! A stout is a very dark, very strong sort of ale, and seems just like the sort of thing Dwarves would be mailing out regularly. I don't know about that whole 'flower child' thing, though. Seems more like something Night Elves would do to their ale.
April's Brew of the Month: Metok's Bubble Bock
April's Brew of the Month has struck, and it's actually pretty fun. Sure, more jokes about bodily functions, but they're acceptable if they're entertaining! This month's definitely qualifies as entertaining. Metok's Bubble Bock is described as being light and uh, bubbly. I suppose you could've guessed that from the name.Upon drinking the Bubble Bock, now and then you will get a buff called Bloated. After five minutes (or after you click the buff off) your character will burp righteously, and a named Brew Bubble will spawn and wander around aimlessly for awhile before popping. You can target it, but you can't cast things such as Baby Spice on it, unfortunately. The bubble can also merge with other bubbles, so get some friends together and try to make a great big one!It's actually somewhat interesting that they chose to name this brew a Bock. A brew they describe as light and bubbly would actually be pretty dark, unless I've confused my beers somewhere. Bocks were often used and praised for their nutrient content, because compared to light brews, it could actually keep you fairly sated during fasts and period where high quality food was scarce. A bock was not the best choice for this particular brew! Again, though, I could be totally wrong. I don't even like most beer.
UPDATED: Brew of the Year removed from Brewmaster achievement on PTR
EDIT: Bornakk says that the achievement will be replaced in the meta achievement with one that requires you to simply sign up for the Brew of the Month Club. And for those who doubted my psychic powers: Noblegarden achievements are being added to Long, Strange Trip.Following the pattern of removing achievements that take a while to complete from the holiday meta-achievements, Blizzard yanked Brew of the Year from Brewmaster on the current 3.1 PTR. This means that anyone who was missing it now has yet another fair shake at getting their Violet Proto-Drake for completing all of the other holiday achievements for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. I'm pleased that players who missed that one achievement can still have a shot at the big prize, but man, there seems to be an awful lot of meta-achievement caving lately. It just creates the impression that complaining about something will get it changed, and I don't think that's what Blizzard wants players to believe.To be fair, it was physically impossible for Death Knights to get this achievement until sometime in 2010. This is a good change for them and I'm okay with that. And no, I'm not against Blizzard removing unfair achievements from reward-bearing metas. This was also the only achievement which was impossible to complete during the event itself. We'll see if the pattern holds after people miss another impossible-to-miss achievement in the Noblegarden set. Grats to those for whom this achievement change will make a difference, and early props for your purple dragon.
