SF Beer Week 2012 Recap

I did the terribly over-emotional recap here last year, and I stand by it. I could write the same thing again, with a little more familiarity and a few more friends, but the idea is the same. Every year, I get to live through ten days that remind me how lucky I am to be a part of what I believe is the strongest craft beer community in the country, and I am so grateful for that opportunity.

I won't be writing any big features on the events I attended, namely because I didn't take any photos this year. Last year I tried to jump around as much as possible and thought about how I would "cover" something; this year, I decided to live in the moment and let the week guide me wherever made sense. I'm so glad I did. There are all sorts of brilliant beer bloggers out there that covered them much better than I would have anyway, and hopefully by now you've gotten an opportunity to relive some of those events through their recaps.

I would like to discuss a couple of my highlights, however, and the comments section is there if you'd like to discuss yours as well.

SF Beer Week Opening Celebration, or what I will always refer to as either The Gala or Beer Prom - Many of you will remember that I was mildly vocal regarding my disappointment at last year's opening event. The more vulgar among you might recall that I was sort of a dick about it. I could not be happier with the improvements that were made this year.

The location was great, and while some people might disagree, I'm glad the VIP tickets are done with. For a massive event such as this, it just seems unfair to put a luxury tax on the "special" beers, which is what happened last year. People who wanted first crack could line up early, and they did. I arrived around 5:40 and was pretty far back in line, but I was through the doors by 6:10 at the latest and the hall was nowhere near filling up. There were over 60 breweries in attendance and I only made it to a handful. If I did have to wait in a line, it was less than ten minutes, and it's worth noting that only happened to me a couple of times for a couple of very special beers that I knew would have long lines. Aside from the lack of bathrooms (which is a significant problem and does need to be dealt with for next year), I think this year was a spectacular hit. I hope it's at this location again next year.

My other criticism would be a lack of seating. It seems silly at a three hour beer festival, sure, but by the end, every ounce of sitting-friendly space was taken up by people who just needed to get off their feet for a second. A few chairs or benches spread out around the place would have been a nice addition (if nothing else, certain areas seemed to be a little traffic-clogged toward the end of the night).

Congratulations to the organizers of this year's event - you clearly listened to the community after last year and all that thoughtfulness really came out in the party. Everyone I was with had an incredible time and we're still talking about it two weeks later.

Sour Sunday - the unofficial name we've all given to Triple Rock and Jupiter's sour events. My word, what a great day. We started at Triple Rock and we were a few minutes late to the party. The line was long, but only took us 25 minutes or so. It was one-in, one-out by that point, but I think that's a good decision. It was crowded inside without being terribly unmanageable. All of the American sours were pushed onto the patio upstairs, which led to some interesting traffic jams. The patio is beautiful and is my favorite thing about Triple Rock, but since many of us were really there to try the hard-to-find American beers, we mostly camped out and got terribly cozy. $20 for entry snagged you four full pours, and everyone I spoke to was offering a small tasting before you committed to using one of your precious tickets.

After we left Triple Rock, we headed to Jupiter for the end of their event. There was ample space on the back patio, so we cozied up and filled our bellies with pizza. (The more ambitious among us continued on to the Mission Rosamunde for the rest of the evening. That pizza was necessary.) The lovely Kelsey of Drake's poured me a barrel-aged version of Drakonic, which would lead to me snapping it up everywhere I could find it for the rest of the week. I am a creature of delicious habit.

And perhaps the best thing about Sour Sunday, for those of you who know the two of us personally, is that Eric took the greatest photo of myself and Jeff ever. I'll be framing it.

Photo credit to Beer and Pork

Butchers and Beers - Please do yourself a favor and check out Brian's excellent photos and writeup over at Bay Area Craft Beer. This is the sort of event that I would love to see more of in San Francisco. Yes, there was unlimited beer, yes, there was unlimited (and exquisite) food. But the star of the show here really was the education we all received. I'm not used to spending my Monday night sharing a room with 50 food nerds who are actually in it to learn something. We watched and asked questions as Ryan Farr expertly butchered half of a 300 pound pig - beers in hand, of course.

If you ever have the opportunity to see a Ryan Farr breakdown, make it a priority. He's funny and conversational, all while educating you on the process and showing a clear amount of respect for the job he's privileged to perform every day. All questions were answered without disrupting the process. And, of course, the food is just ridiculous. I've certainly eaten my share of crispy pig fat for the year. (Not that it's going to stop me.) The beer was fantastic, the crowd was lively. I wish there had been a little more seating - I showed up right as the event was scheduled to start and all the tables were claimed already, and none of the guests saw fit to rotate off of their tables as the night progressed. I'm sure I'd be the same way, but it did make eating a little difficult. Luckily the pork was tender enough that a knife was never, ever called for!

I sincerely hope events like this are part of a larger trend in our beer culture. Everyone walked away full, happy, and having learned a little something new.

Sau and Brau - Two days after my dinner of unlimited beer and pork, I went to a dinner of unlimited beer and pork. I am nothing if not consistent. The good folks at Drake's certainly know how to throw a party! I realized far too late that the first of the three hours was a happy hour, offering unlimited pours of Drake's regular beers. The lovely Kelsey offered me an extra drink ticket to make up for what was ultimately my own misunderstanding, a much appreciated gesture.

Is there anything to say about Drake's barrel-aged beers that hasn't been said? These are folks who are just doing everything right. The Drakonic brewed with Tcho and Blue Bottle was fantastic. The Brett beer (whose name escapes me at the moment) was fantastic. I can go on and on and sing the praises of every single thing I tried. Seating was more than adequate, the food was great, and the atmosphere was terribly friendly and fun. My dining companion and I made fast friends with the strangers at our table and we had a lovely evening. I hadn't originally planned to attend since San Leandro is a little difficult for the car-less among us to reach, but I'm so pleased that I had the opportunity.

SF Homebrewer's Guild at Pi Bar - For years, many of us have been saying "man, there really needs to be a homebrew club in San Francisco". A few have loosely tried to get plans together that fell through one way or the other. But finally, Chris Cohen sucked it up on behalf of all of us and put a ton of work into actually making it happen. There will be many more events of this type, and when they come up, you should jump on them immediately. The ludicrously low price of $15 gets you in the door and allows you to sample all the homebrew you could ask for, as well as pizza and salad to soak up all the booze in your belly. (In my case it was soaking up the morning's hangover. Day Ten was a rough one for some of us.)

At any homebrew event, there's going to be some bad with the good. We're experimenting and there's no one to set the rules; they can't all be winners. That being said, I am absolutely stunned at the variety and skill displayed by homebrewers in this city. The keg of Flanders Red in the corner (which is partially brewed by my friend Eric, but there is no bias in that statement) was stunning. Gail of Beer By Bart brought a couple of the most fun sours I've tasted in ages. Powell Avenue Brew knocked it out of the park with the selections they brought (and I will absolutely be stealing the "use butternut squash" idea when I brew a pumpkin beer later this year). Chris' hibiscus rye saison made me want to go home and brew a clone immediately. I almost didn't mention those highlights, because it seems like a damn shame to not mention all the things I really enjoyed. I was just overwhelmed by the generosity and excitement of our homebrew community - people didn't bring "what they had", they brought what they were proud of. As a homebrewer myself, I could not have left feeling more inspired.

Watching the evolution of SF Beer Week over the years has just been fascinating. Some events are seriously getting out of control - the crowds are bigger than ever and in a tiny little city with tiny little bars, it's going to be interesting to see how we can move forward. The compulsion to make things bigger and better is certainly admirable, but we're working with a finite amount of space sometimes. I cannot believe the amount of work that people put in - paid and unpaid - to bring all of this together. This ten day party doesn't organize itself!

So thanks, folks - the events I've listed above are just a drop in the bucket of what I attended, not to mention the literally hundreds of events that were out there. Now that I've had a week to live off that continuously compounded hangover, I'm already anticipating next year. Cheers!

Reflections on SF Beer Week

I attended 19 beer events over the course of seven days. That's 19 events all within a five mile radius of my house.

I skipped the last three days of SF Beer Week because I was so sick I could have infected all the thousands of you that kept on going right through the 20th. With 19 events, I think it's safe to estimate that I consumed roughly 97,000 beers within 168 hours time. This estimation is rough, of course, but I assume yours are similar.

Joking aside, let's talk for a moment about how lucky we all are to have a week like this to participate in. I've never been a part of a beer week in another city. I hear Denver is great, I hear Philly is great. Everyone I know that's been to Oregon during beer month tells me how much I'd love it. I'm sure I'll make it out to all those cities eventually, but for the moment, I'm happy to revel in what we've got right here.

I'd like to get a little personal and nostalgic for a moment. I moved to San Francisco on September 1st, 2008. I had no money, literally living off of a loan that in the pre-credit crisis era was able to be maxed out on things like rent and burritos that could be stretched to last three days. (Say what you will about Taqueria Cancun; when you've got a broken collar bone and you're living at 18th & Mission, you can make one last for breakfast, lunch and dinner and maybe even breakfast the next day.) I knew one person. He only knew me. The social situation was, let's say, sparse.

I made it a little worse for myself by insisting on being a freelancer. Being a freelancer performs two opposite tasks simultaneously: You meet a ton of people, and you become friends with absolutely none of them. I've racked up more professional contacts in this city than I could start to list, but friends took a little bit longer to find.

Before San Francisco, I made legitimate stabs at building a life in Kansas City, New York City and Cincinnati, three cities with excellent access to craft beer. I've lived with accessible Bell's, Brooklyn, Boulevard - if you can get it between Colorado and Maine, I've probably lived somewhere I could pick it up. When I moved to the west coast, I wasn't excited about moving to some crazy beer mecca. Cincinnati's beer scene was exploding just as I was about to leave with incredible bars and people that cared so much about showcasing their more-than-a-century-old brewing philosophy. Moving to San Francisco made me a little heartbroken, to be honest, for all the beer I'd be losing in my day to day life.

You don't have to go back to 2008 and slap me; I don't need it. You could gently tell me how much I was about to learn and how much my life was about to change, though.

Moving to a completely new area of the country prepped with a really solid knowledge base from somewhere else just turns you into a kid in a candy store. I wandered into Shotwell's, nee Inner Mission Beer Parlor, about two months into moving west. Within a few months I had tried everything on the menu. It wasn't enough. Corner stores, brewpubs, nerdy beer blogs - give it to me.

Somewhere along the line, I got "into" the beer world. I don't know how it happens. You make some friends on Twitter. You start to recognize people because you're always at the same events. You share information, you retweet. You write about beer every once in awhile. Someone sees you talking to people about beer often enough and they decide you know your stuff; soon enough you're being introduced to distributors and brewers. Somewhere along the line, nothing is enough. Never satisfied, never done learning.

It has been an absolute pleasure to party with all of you for the past week. Is it really nerdy that most of my real life friends directly or indirectly met me through the Internet? I don't care. My word, what a party this week was. I have learned to stop blushing when someone introduces me as "At JRizzo". I shared beers - in some cases, quite literally - with so many of you. I wasn't alone anywhere. I'm no longer faceless in this city, and I have beer to thank.

I get so much joy out of telling people stories about our beer scene. A non-beer-drinking friend (I've got them, yes) came by to see me at 21A on Imperial Jack night and wanted to know what the big event was. I told her the whole thing - the first brewing of Imperial Jack, who Richard is, why ESB is so special, what this beer is about, how it came to be entered into the World Beer Cup. Stories I've heard over sharing pints with the people who make the beer as well as the people who love it. Stories that make this city's beer scene more than good beer, more than creative beer, more than just a list of places to grab a pint. I take so much pride in knowing all of those things. I sat at the Beer and Nosh dinner at The Summit and someone opened a door for me to spend three minutes describing the science and use of Brettanomyces, and they cared. They listened. We learned together.

People are always asking how I know this person or that person, how I know what beer is where, how I know where the cool events are. Just saying "Twitter" sounds so silly, doesn't it? I'll figure out how exactly it works sometime, but for now, it's certainly not hurting anything.

Nineteen events. I'm still sorting through all of the photos, and god knows I'll never be able to list all the beer. If I tried less than 100 different beers this week, I'd be shocked. They were all real. Someone made every single one of them. They aren't competing; they're friends. Beer community, you're a card.

Thank you to everyone for the laughter, for the hugs, for the sips of your beer, for the glasses of water, for the immediate @ responses when one of you posted about a fascinating beer that made me rush across town to try it. Singling out my favorite event is impossible, but Breweries of Tomorrow, The Summit, MK/Heart Cask Night, Lost Coast at South End, Local at Shotwell's, Breckle's at Anchor, and Russian River at Pi all hold pretty dear places in my heart.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of great recaps roll in. I'm looking forward to your thoughts, to weeks worth of discussion, and to a whole year to anticipate doing this ride all over again. Cheers, y'all.

Thoughts on SF Beer Week Opening Gala

It's really hard to deal with the fact that so many people are getting into craft beer, isn't it? (Most of my problems are first world. I admit this out of the gate.) We worked so hard for so long to get people to love things that weren't Miller Lite. Countless "No, here, try this" attempts met with turned up noses, more piss-water comments than one person can possibly be required to handle from someone sucking down well vodka.

And THIS is our reward? The beer dinners we once held precious sell out faster than we can get to a computer. The beers we anticipate for months get snapped off the shelves before you can get off work. The thing we once looked at as "ours" and really wanted everyone to share with us now belongs to everyone. News stories circulate from time to time about how craft beer is outselling everything, beat the recession, and might as well be the only thing keeping the economy afloat, but it's how that trend trickles down that gets me.

And annoys me. Again - first world.

It's not that it should just be OURS, you know, but the system has not scaled itself up to meet demand. Just because there are ten times as many people drinking craft beer doesn't mean production has ramped itself up in the exact same amount. This was terribly clear last night.

Lots of good folks planned the SF Beer Week Opening Gala. Lots of good, smart people, who love beer. It was a largely thankless job for them and I can't imagine how much stress went into it. I'm thankful that they do things like this so I don't have to, but that being said, I'm about to get super critical. I'm sorry, guys, but I sincerely hope you all learn from these mistakes for last year. And, yes, they were absolutely mistakes.

I bought the $45 Early Bird regular ticket instead of the $65 VIP. That mistake gets to be on my part, and I won't be making it again next year. My reasons weren't really financially driven, more that I knew it was unwise for me to start drinking beer at 3:30 in the afternoon, stay through all of my regular ticket friends showing up from 5-9, then try to hit the Toronado after party. $20 for an hour and a half that will probably just lead to me being drunk and belligerent is not the way I wanted to start Beer Week, so I decided to go with the 5:00 option. Of course, had I waited instead of being responsible and buying my ticket early, the day regular ticket sales went on, I could have bought the VIP ticket for $56 via a Groupon knockoff. Brian has already covered that much better than I would over here at All Over Beer, so I'll save myself the breath needed for that one.

We arrived late, which is a combination of my mistake and Muni being Muni. Delays I am incapable of understanding meant we got there around 6. I had been reading the updates on how bad the line was via Twitter, so I'm not sure what I thought would happen - maybe there was a huge bottleneck at 5 and things would be better an hour later? I couldn't have been more wrong. We waited in line for an hour.

Let's discuss crowd calming, shall we? When we were about 75 people back in line - after we had been waiting for 45 minutes already - someone was sent out to inform the angry, sober people holding $45 tickets on what was happening. He started out by saying that they weren't going to cut off the crowd - yet - and wanted to reassure us that they hadn't overbooked, there's just a fire code on how many people can be inside at once.

Allow me to take a moment to talk about how overbooking goes. I'll use an airplane as an example. An airplane has 200 seats. The airline sells 210 seats. This is traditionally referred to as "overbooking". It is particularly effective on morning flights, because people miss those flights. By overbooking, they can ensure that the 200 seats will be filled. In the event that all 210 people show up, they have to reschedule and offer people new incentives to bail on the flight - a $150 travel voucher for a new flight or something. The airline loses money on this, but since it usually works out, they keep overbooking. And, because airlines are smart enough, they don't get on the speaker and announce "We didn't overbook the plane, but 10 of you that bought tickets can't fit on it."

So let's apply that to something we're all also familiar with, say, a beer festival that opens one of the most popular beer weeks in the country. The building can hold, say, 1000 people. You have two options: you can sell 1000 tickets, or you can overbook. What you CANNOT do is pretend you're not overbooking, because that's ridiculous, and the last thing you should do is tell people who have been standing in line for 45 minutes that you didn't overbook, it's just "fire code". We were reassured, however, that once we got inside, it was going to be "awesome".

I should note that they were willing to refund people's tickets if they gave up, but I wasn't worried about the money. I was worried about the beer. And I was right.

So, of course, we get through the doors and they're out of glasses. Frustrating. Also expected, by this point. And before I can even get to the place where my disposable plastic cup is, Jesse of Almanac greets me with "We're out of beer." This would be a common theme in the next two hours of my life.

You will not be reading reviews here for Almanac, Lagunitas Fusion, Marin's 21 Year Old Ale, Speakeasy's Ritual Payback Porter, Moonlight's Two Weeks Notice, Pliny the Younger, Supplication, Vertical Jewbilation, or quite a few others that you might be interested in discussing. They were all gone.

The phrase of the night was "shit show". Why were there so many people there? (Furthermore, why did people on a damned Bloomspot mailing list get to walk right in while those of us who were responsible and gave our money to the event early had to stand there waiting for an hour? Poor form, guys.) Sell half as many tickets. Double the price. Sell a third and triple the price, for christ's sake.

It's completely unclear who this event was for. Was it for beer geeks? We're a good community, but we're a pretty small community. Usually I feel like things like this are thrown for us - weird one-off beers are kind of our bread and butter. I kind of doubt that Fusion is brewed for people who don't drink beer. Or, if I'm wrong, was the idea to expose people to beer? If that's the case, be a little more upfront about that. I had a similar criticism for the "Beer Fest" at the Giants stadium last year - too crowded, full of people that are just there because they want to get drunk, nothing geared toward beer folk. Be upfront about what kind of an event you're organizing. It really felt like we got tricked on this one.

And I want my glass. I'm very serious about that glass, guys.

I'm also serious about water. If there was any water to be found, I have no idea where it was. I had a giant bottle in my bag and I'm terribly glad that I did. There's got to be somewhere that you can rent little water systems and hire one person to run around all night and make sure they're staying full. It's just responsible.

Overall, I had a really good time. I did. But that wasn't due to the event at all, it was due to all the great folks in our beer community. The social aspect of events like this is great - you get to talk about new beers, you get to introduce everyone to everyone else. I feel like I know a pretty big number of people in our little community, but I got to put some additional faces to Twitter names, which is always a great (if startling) experience.

Oh, and next year, I'm not even going to try to go to Toronado. That one's not worth discussing; we all knew that was going to be impossible. Cheers to those of you smart enough to leave the gala early and get tables.

Next year: Jumping on the VIP ticket, assuming I'm going to take a half day off of work and be there before 3:30. Lesson learned.