The Culture crew just got back from the Fancy food Show on Wednesday! It's quite the experience the first time around. This year it was held in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in D.C. It also happened to be murderously hot outdoors, which made the cavernous interior of the venue a welcome refuge.

Laid out in aisles by country and state, with rough categories within that structure, the show is massive. Overwhelming is a word I heard often in the three days we were there. It took a full ten minutes to get from end to end at a swift clip.

That said, thousands of vendors are there to show off their product, which means mass amounts of free food, drink, and…ummm…CHEEESE!!

I spent a lot of time at the World’s Best Cheese Booth, (where Culture had it’s corner) which was full of awesome cheese and makers, including Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy,Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery, Caroline Hostettler and Rolf Beeler, to name a very few. Needless to say I did not go hungry.

The real cheese mecca, was upstairs in the American Cheese Society rea, and it was a treat to finally meet many of the cheese-people I’ve heard about, and, of course, to taste their cheese.

Conveniently, the beer area was right next to the cheese so I had my fill of Lagunitas (who has a great new blonde), Victory, and Dogfish, among others.

I walked around slightly buzzed after that…through Austria, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. (I also ate a lot of chocolate!!)

The cheese pairing possibilities were endless….jams, preserves, olive oils, sparkling juices, crackers (Effie’s Oatcakes and Daelia’s Biscuits for Cheese, to name a favorite two)! Winn!!

By the end of each day, our “dogs were barking,” as I heard one cheese maker say about her feet, and we were asleep by the time our heads hit the pillow.

I’m home now, mulling over the business cards I gathered, and trying to record some of the great stories I heard while there, and burn some important faces into my memory.

It was a privilege to be amongst such dedicated lovers of food and drink.