Here are some highlights from the recently concluded Frisco Beer Week: http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2012/...riple-rock-anderson-valley-ballast-point.html . Looks like Seattle Beer Week has it's work cut out for it.
Slide #5 - Chile Pepper Thunder Fuck from the Brew Lab hootenanny was indeed a fiery out of body experience. Of course, I'm not prejudiced just 'cause my kid brewed it. Nah. Okay, I am.
Don't get be wrong, I love Ballast Point beers, but their barrel aging program needs some work imo. Not that it's necessarily bad, just not as good as I would expect. On another note- that Rodgers Last Stand at triple rock was AMAZING, so was the Keyser Soze.
Terry. You should c'mon down in March for the Sour tasting....I have been pretty underwhelmed by Seattle Beer Week and I have been to SFO Beer Week. I love, drink and covet local but as big as Seattle is they have to step up. As I browsed SFO Beer Week agenda I was not that impressed. The over abundance of costly beer dinners needs to go away and focus on more release parties, mini fests, pub crawls and attracting breweries that are not West Coast centric. A 3F night at Brouwers Cafe on a Friday night would turn a record number. Additionally, HoTD w/ HoTD was at The Dray which holds 50 people max, last year was a massive line out the door and that was impossible, especially in the Seattle Spring rain. A larger venue(like BPP) should be hosting these larger scale events. Last but not least, I know this is Seattle Beer Week but Tacoma bars need to get off their ass! San Jose and Santa Rosa chip in for SFO so there is no excuse for Tacoma until they create a real Tacoma Beer Week. It was nice to meet and shake hands w/ Alan Sprints at Back in Black last year. Thanks to Super Deli Mart for their daily SBW contributions.
Yeah, I think it should be "Puget Sound" BW. We're not quite big enough up here for our own (although a couple places did try to get Bellingham BW going, the response from most places was "why bother? we've got our crowd." Even if it was an Everett-to-Tacoma focused week, it would open more venues and make it easier for those of us in the hinterlands to attend more events. We can justify driving or taking the train to Everett 3-6 times over 10 days than going to Seattle the same amount. A few of us hit "Closing Ceremonies" at Hales a couple years ago and that was a blast. Hales Palladium is a venue that could be used a bit more I think. As i mentioned, I've lived out here over 11 years now and I've never been to Tacoma. If there were a couple SBW events on back-to-back days, I'd come down and explore. Hit up E9 and Red Hot, take in whatever events were going on and maybe check out a band at night. I agree SBW should be a hell of a lot bigger than it is, we need to start prodding people a little I think.
My apologies for dropping a deuce on the SFO Beer Week thread but I had to say it for Seattle's sake. Much love. Terry, Hale's local is under utilized! Great space with greater potential and Winter Beerfest proves it.
It's also easy to lose track of all the good SF Beer Week events amid all the expensive beer dinners. I really wish they would hire a competent enough web developer to actually separate events out by category, geography of featured brewers, etc. I mean, I have nothing to complain about when there were multiple tap takeovers each for Lost Abbey, Russian River, Dogfish Head, Firestone Walker, and Cantillon. The fact that it wasn't easy to know that is a big issue.
Yeah, I was looking for a good day by day event posting on the SFO site. A Cantillon tap takeover. Party on.
By "SFO" do you mean "San Francisco"? I had been assuming so but this statement seems weird. Anyway, SFO is the airport, I've never heard anyone call the city that before.
Yup: SF, SanFran, City by the Bay, SFO..I mainly know it as SFO because of the hundreds of times I have flown out of there.
