Brewfest, the annual Warcraft festival of in-game ales, is almost upon us! Brewfest starts tomorrow, September 28th, and has been retuned for Mists of Pandaria. Gone are the heady Cataclysm days of ignoring all of Coren Direbrew’s mechanics, as he remained a level 80 boss being nuked down by level 85 players. Coren evidently had some time off work to level himself up in the early days of Mists, as he’s been scaled up to a 90+ elite boss, probably getting Realm First Angry Dwarf. Players now have to be level 89 to queue for his instance, which opens tomorrow.

Initially, the Brewfest event was slated to start five days before the release of Mists, and finish 10 days after it had launched, meaning that Coren Direbrew’s instance couldn’t be queued for until 5 days after the Brewfest event had begun, and that players had just ten days to get to 89 and queue for the instance before it disappeared for another year. Happily, Blizzard Blues Vaneras posted a while back announcing that Brewfest would be postponed to September 28th, and would run right up to the start of Hallow’s End.

This still means, though, that if you want a chance for the Brewfest Kodo or the Brewfest Ram, you need to hit level 89 or level 90 before the Brewfest event disappears on October 13th.

Happily, the other elements of the Brewfest festival have far less tiresome level attachments, such as the Wolpertinger pet, or the long list of vanity items, including what are basically Blizzard’s rendering of what us Brits call beer goggles, which, bizarrely, turn all Alliance players into gnomes, and all Horde players into orcs. Maybe reverse beer goggles…

There’s also a title up for grabs, Brewmaster, which is part of the meta achievement What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. As per Ghostcrawler’s blog a while back, Long Strange Trip is now account-wide, meaning that you can complete Brewmaster on one alt, and have that count for Long Strange trip on all alts. What isn’t quite clear yet is whether the sub-achievements that make up Brewmaster can be shared across several alts. It seems like this is highly likely, if you consider that this screenshot comes from my PvP twink hunter who has never set foot in a Brewfest throughout her short life.

This will be the first annual event since the 5.0.4 changes to achievements came into being, so it’s likely that there will be a whole lot of new Brewmasters running around the various cities.

Brewfest’s main festival areas can be found outside Ironforge and Orgrimmar, and beer tents are also located outside Silvermoon City, Darnassus, Undercity, Stormwind, Thunder Bluff, the Exodar, and Shattrath.

So what are you looking to get out of Azeroth’s annual kegger?