BetterBeerBlog

Not bad for your first stab at putting on a beer festival. Pretty darned good, actually.

By many accounts, the Brewing Network’s first Winter Brews Festival was a success. There seemed to be several hundred craft beer lovers in attendance, if not thousands. A break in the Bay Area’s winter weather brought out the sun and made what was supposed to be a festival celebrating winter brews into a celebration of good weather, good friends and great beer.

The Brewing Network did a fantastic job of rounding up brewers to participate. The 38 breweries in attendance featured a strong, local flavor but distant breweries such as Alaskan Brewing Company, Ninkasi Brewing Company, Green Flash Brewing and New Belgium featured beers on tap as well. Here’s a list of the participating breweries:

• 21st Amendment
• Speakeasy
• Iron Springs
• Lagunitas
• Moylan’s
• Marin
• Russian River
• Firestone Walker
• Linden St
• Magnolia
• Triple Rock
• Drake’s
• Odonata
• Valley Brewing CO.
• The Bruery
• Gordon Biersch
• Ale Industries
• Firehouse Grill
• Stone
• Deschutes
• Rogue
• EJ Phair
• Schooner’s
• Elysian
• Alaskan
• Black Diamond
• Pacific Coast
• Two Rivers Cider
• Uncommon Brewers
• Moonlight
• Drake’s
• Black Diamond
• Jack’s
• Green Flash
• Bear Republic
• New Belgium
• Ninkasi
• Shmaltz

Beers were organized into 5 groups, each group featuring a theme. “The Darkness” as the name would imply, featured darker, malt-dominant beers that ranged from an ESB all the way through to stouts. Beers within “The Higher Ground” category were primarily big, wintery beers of higher alcohol content. “The Dankness” category represented hop-forward beers while the smallest category, “The Funk”, featured 2 sour ales and Belgian black ale. The final category, “The Works”, seemed to be a catch-all that featured beers brewed with interesting ingredients or just didn’t really fit into the other categories. To give you an idea of what was in “The Works”, Monk’s Blood, a Belgian dark strong ale brewed with figs was featured in with this group as was the Bacon Brown, an ale brewed with pork bellies from Uncommon Breweries.

Food was provided mainly by the homebrew chef Sean Paxton. Pork was the featured animal and word was Sean brought with him two whole pigs injected with Lagunitas’ Brown Shugga to be used in the meals he prepared. In addition, sausages made from local pork and cooked with local beer were on the menu as well as confited duck legs sourced from Sonoma. In addition to Sean Paxton, additional food was supplied by Emergency BBQ while a vegetarian-friendly offering was at the beer fest as well.

A feature that was pleasantly unexpected, and unadvertised, at this beerfest was the inclusion of homebrews in a homebrew pavilion of sorts. The beers supplied by 2 4 local homebrew clubs, the Bay Area Mashers, Draught Board (thanks @bjornidentity) with members of the Mad Zymurgists and D.O.Z.E assisting, seemed to be just as popular as their professional counterparts. Unlike the professional beers, tasting the homebrews required no tickets but you only got a half pour.

Despite everything that went right with this inaugural beerfest, there were a few things that could be improved upon. First, there needed to be more portable toilets. At the height of the festival, it wouldn’t be uncommon to wait nearly 30 minutes for your turn at a Port-o-pottie. Even with 6 port-o-potties in the back of the festival, the line seemed unusually long, while the 2 in the front were woefully inadequate to service the people in those areas.

While the food from Sean Paxton and Emergency BBQ seemed to be excellent, the lines for either one stretched out for dozens of yards. People began to line up for Sean Paxton’s food an hour before even before the pigs were done cooking. The long wait times and lines were unacceptable to me and I didn’t get a chance to try any of Sean’s cooking. Luckily the group of people I went with brought sandwiches. As a by-product of the long food lines, bottlenecks started to form around the beer fest making getting around difficult in certain areas. Hopefully the next beer fest will feature more and/or a greater variety of food vendors to help alleviate congestion.

It took a few hours for everything to start running a bit more smoothly but it was rough in the beginning. With the exception of the beers from “The Higher Ground”, a single drink ticket would net you a full pour while half a drink ticket a half pour. Great idea but it wasn’t readily known to the volunteers pouring early on. Also, signage for the event left a lot of room for improvement, making it difficult at times to locate certain beers on the list. In addition to improving signage in the future, I hope the organizers take a look at the how traffic flowed and will hopefully arrange things differently in future beer festivals to minimize bottlenecks and chokepoints.

The Winter Brews Fest from the Brewing Network was a very impressive showing for a freshmen effort. Even though I didn’t really mention them, host brewery Linden Street Brewery gets a lot of credit for the success of the festival as well. If you get a chance, try their California Common (aka “Steam” beer); it gives Anchor Brewing a run for their money. Between the homebrew clubs and professional breweries in attendance, there were plenty of good beers to be had. And while not everything went off without hitch, the issues I brought up can be improved upon to create an even better beer festival. The bar they’ve set for themselves is pretty high and I am looking forward to the next beer festival organized by the Brewing Network.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 12:07 am and is filed under Beer Festivals, Craft Beer, Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.