We did Howl-o-scream on a Thursday (10/7) evening and the Bier Fest on a Friday (10/8) afternoon. For Howl-o-scream you need a separate ticket which gets you an arm band, the staff starts kicking out the patrons without an arm band at around 5:00. We had purchased our Howl-o-scream tickets directly through Busch Gardens. The event was “OK”. There were five haunted houses set up, they were neat to go through. The scare part is the ghouls jumping out at you. The scare zones set up throughout the park were kind of corny but fun. My only real complaint is that the Howl-o-scream park map is kind of hard to follow. The Bier Fest just requires a normal ticket, which we had ordered off of TripAdvisor. Our tickets wouldn’t work to let us in. We had to spend about 30-40 minutes getting them straightened out. I would like to thank Brian and Kay-Kay in admissions and Alicia at the gate for all of their help! Several observations on the Bier Fest. The Fest consist of 20 separate kiosk set up throughout the park. The kiosk have mainly beer and food with a couple of them having cocktails and one having wine and another with bourbon. To start with,I would highly recommend purchasing a lanyard. The lanyard enables you to get sample sized amounts (7 oz., I think) of the alcohol at the kiosks as opposed to full sized cups. The beer selection wasn’t very exotic, or craft like. It was for the most part a large brewery with a couple of popular local breweries thrown in, nothing that you can’t get at the local ABC. We had a great time, my only complaints would be that the guy at kiosk 17; which had seltzer’s, didn’t know anything about the Bier Fest and wouldn’t recognize our lanyards for the seltzer samples even though there was a placard for the event on the bar. Also, the wine kiosk had four different wines, it would have been nice to be able to get a small sample of all four as opposed to a full sized glass of only one flavor. All and all we had a great time. The bonus was that there were short lines throughout park, we never waited at any of the kiosks and the lines at the roller coasters were manageable.