09 | October | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Brewfest came to its close in Wrath Classic early in the morning this past Friday. This last round of the event was really our first attempt at running it. We didn’t run it last year because Wrath Classic had just launched and we were busy getting up to level 70 and figuring out the fight with Prince Keleseth in Utgarde Keep.

Brewfest was a thing before Wrath of course, but in my world holiday events in WoW didn’t become a thing until achievements gave you goals and title and mounts and pets stopped taking up bag space. That was pretty much the way things went for me back in the first pass through Wrath and it was repeated in the classic version.

This time around we were all up for Brewfest.

At Brewfest, my stein at the ready

Our basic goals were simple. We wanted the meta achievement and the title and the pink pachyderm pet. That meant doing a bunch of the event activities at least once and earning 300 Brewfest tokens, 100 for the pet and 200 for Brew of the Month Club membership. That was actually the last thing I did for the title because I bought the pet first.

Brewmaster and Brew of the Month Club… was Brewmaster always a panda?

We did the one time events, then came back to do the dailies to build up the required coins. The ram racing and barking are always a bit annoying, but tolerable for a bit. Fighting off the Dark Iron invasion, an event that comes up every 30 minutes, ended up being doable with three or four people once we realized that only one Brewfest keg had to survive. Get everybody defending one key and have somebody run out to grab the super brew every time to slow down the waves and you can knock out the ~250 Dark Iron dwarves needed for a win.

Super brew? That’s my cue!

And we had to go down into Blackrock Depths to the Grim Guzzler in order to defeat Coren Direbrew. That was a bit of a challenge on the first run because we had just done the Dark Iron invasion and were all completely smashed, which made running down the chains over the lava as we bobbed and weaved in our inebriation something of an event on its own.

Down the first set of chains

Fortunately, nobody fell into the lava, though it was a bit nerve wracking.

Coren wasn’t too tough, even for just the four of us. We knocked him out on the first try.

Achievement with a keg on my head

We actually had to do it four times, because everybody had the quest. But that was fine, more loot to drop. And one item was his remote.

Direbrew’s Remote

The remote summons a Dark Iron tunneling machine, which Ula dubbed “The Screwhouse,” which became our guild term for it. That made getting there a snap. Having picked that up, and recalling that Coren can drop two nice mounts, the Brewfest ram and kodo, we decided to make the Coren run a nightly event until the end of Brewfest.

Brewfest Mounts

So we met up every evening at 9pm local time for four runs at Coren to see if we could shake loose a mount.

The Screwhouse arrives to take us to Coren

We certainly got a lot of things to drop. Unfortunately, most of what Coren drops is unique and cannot be disenchanted, so after not too many days our four characters were ending up not being able to roll on or claim the loot from the drops, meaning we left four still sparkling Coren corpses on the floor after we were done.

Coren Corpses

We did get one mount drop. The festive Brewfest ram dropped one evening, and Ula won the roll for it. So we didn’t go completely unrewarded on the mount front… but it still wasn’t exactly raining kodos either.

On one trip I noticed that there was a drum kit set up in the Grim Guzzler.

Waiting for a set in the bar

I had totally forgotten that, during Brewfest, you can speak to one of the goblin roadies… if you have Direbrew’s remote… who will then summon the the Tauren Chieftans for a performance. Fun times.

The Tauren Chieftans playing Brewfest at the Grim Guzzler

So we got to see that.

We got to the final evening and, once more ended up with no additional mounts. However, by then we all had the achievement and the title and the pet, so our goals had been met. We took a screen shot with Coren to commemorate our last run of the event.

Hanging with Coren while he goes over his plan

Until next year. I suppose with the coming of the Dungeon Finder tomorrow, it will be even easier to just queue up with every character every day of the event. Looking back at old posts, it took me five years before I had both of the event mounts.

That isn’t so bad… compared to the Headless Horseman’s mount from Hallow’s End. I ran that event consistently for a decade and never got that drop. But Hallow’s End is coming up shortly, so I will be able to make some more attempts at that.

Past Brewfest posts: