The Great American Beer Festival, the second largest beer festival in the world took place last month and I had the good fortune of attending this year’s festivities. Celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, the GABF tickets sold out in record time, clocking in with 49,000 attendees. There were 466 breweries at the festival, serving 2,375 different beers, and 238 medals were awarded, including 18 to breweries entering the competition for the first time. In a word, it was EPIC.
Every trip I take begins with the mapping out of local breweries. This week I am vacationing in Chautauqua Lake, located in Western New York, with my fiancée’s family. Along the road-trip from Boston to Chautauqua lie two of the east coast’s greatest breweries Southern Tier and Ommegang. This week I will focus on the prior.
It’s summertime in Boston again, which means it’s time for another American Craft Beer Fest. This year was a lot of fun. Team Beeriety got to try a lot of new beers and chat with a bunch of different beers lovers. We saw some familiar faces, but also made many new friends and tried many new beers. Here are five of our favorites.
The second leg of my beer journey took me to the West Coast, visiting San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area (Seattle and Portland had to be saved for a separate trip). But as far as California is concerned, the craft beer culture is thriving and the level of innovation and experimentation is high. It seems to be the trend in the West; in a culture of hop-heads and extremists, crazy big beers reign the tap lists.
As I began to explore the tremendous world of craft beer a couple of years ago, one thing became abundantly clear: every beer is like a person, possessing individual personalities, stories, and characteristics. The basic components are the same, but the variables that are present give craft beer immense potential to create insanely interesting, complex and delicious beers. I mean really, what could be more exciting?
On Tuesday the Beeriety team joined some great folks for a lovely evening at The Haven, Boston’s premiere Scottish Pub. It was a fun evening with great beer and great conversation and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The highlight of the night was the Haven’s own Special 70 session ale brewed by Notch brewery, which debuted just last week. It’s another great brew by the folks over at Notch, who’ve yet to produce a beer I haven’t enjoyed. The Special 70 was featured in a flight of four ales that folks were able to buy during the event-
If a little sign wasn’t hanging from the top of the building, you’d never even know Brooklyn Brewery was there. Since 1988, Brooklyn has distributed its beer from New York to Texas, and many states in between. On site, Brooklyn only brews about 20-30% of its product, concentrating mainly on their big bottle series (such as the Local 1 and Local 2), along with some more experimental brews. Our tour guide walked us through a quick educational lesson about the main ingredients in beer, the brewing process, and then walked us through the history of the brewery, highlighting the story behind their logo. The tour itself is very short, but everyone is encouraged to stick inside the brew house for 10-15 minutes, take a look at the equipment, and ask more questions as needed. You can even bring your beer from the pub to the tour!
Today’s post comes from Justin K. Thanks Justin!
The New England Real Ale Exhibition (NERAX) runs from March 30th through April 2nd in Somerville, MA. This festival showcases cask ale from British and American breweries. (For a detailed explanation of what cask ale is read Beeriety’s article here.) Because cask ale has a relatively short shelf life once it’s tapped the show focused on having new beers go up each day. If you were to attend Wednesday night and again Saturday you would see two very different beer lists.
Today’s post come courtesy of our newest contributor Justin!
Last weekend Beer Advocate hosted their annual Extreme Beer Festival in Boston. This is easily one of the most popular beer festivals in New England, with both days selling out within hours of being on sale. They showcased over 150 different beers from brewers all over the country.
