Ohio River Paddlefest 2023

We look forward to this event each year. It’s a community event for Cincinnati raising funds for outdoors adventures for city kids. There are food trucks, live music, and vendors. It’s a pretty big deal.

There are two groups that paddle this event. The racers, like us, and the leisure paddlers. This year there were 70 racers of various types and boats and 1500 fun paddlers.

Cincinnati is only a four hour drive from home so we left around 11:00 AM Friday morning. Our first coffee stop was at Best Friends Coffee in Brownsburg, IN. We’ve posted about this shop before. We ordered the dark roast and two bagel sandwiches, which were huge and very tasty.

We arrived at the Friday evening registration got our numbers for the next day’s race and unloaded our boats. There are so many that do this event they line up all the boats in the baseball fields. They have security watch the boats all night.

We listened to some live steel drum music while we visited the food trucks. We found a truck serving delicious Mexican dishes. Mary had a tamale with sauce and street corn; David had the burrito. Both were delicious.

Once the festivities were completed, we loaded up the boats and headed home. But since we’d been up since 5:30, coffee seemed like a good idea. We stopped at the BLOC Coffee Company in Cincinnati. We’ve been to this shop a few times before-it’s sort of on the way out of town and the coffee is very good. They had a medium roast that I really enjoyed. Mary had a cold brew sweetened with vanilla syrup.

Along the side of the coffee shop building is an ice cream shop, The Bold Face Dairy Bar. Since we parked right in front and since we had definitely earned a treat, Mary ordered a small bowl with chocolate dip on top. Very tasty.

We were ready for a break and more coffee on our return home around Greensburg, Indiana. We have visited The Branch – Gathering and Coffee shop on previous trips. On this trip we had a small dark roast and a latte. Both very good.

Generally, we only review coffee brewed at coffee shops that we visit. But this instance was a little different. One of the many vendors at Paddlefest was a small batch coffee roaster named Kayak Coffee. We liked the packaging and the naming so we bought a couple of sample packs-each one enough for a couple of pots.

The next day after we returned from Paddlefest we made a pot of the Back Deck Breakfast Blend in our Chemex. It was smooth and rich. Excellent brew! You might want to take a look at Kayak Coffee online. And no, we do not plan on regularly reviewing whole bean coffee in the future and this is NOT an affiliate link or paid endorsement. We just know good coffee when we taste it. Plus the cool name and packaging.