This past Saturday Annie and I attended the Firestone Walker Beer Festival at the Paso Robles Event Center. It was the second annual event and just like last year someone put in an order for a hot day…roughly 103 degrees on Saturday followed by the mid 80’s on Sunday, a little backward if you ask me.
The heat aside, the event was a lot like last year although it seemed a little smoother this year getting into the event. As someone that loves beer but has spent far more time and energy in the wine world, I’m really amazed to see such a similar reaction to beer that I have seen to wine. Watching people on Twitter talk about this event as well as seeing the people at the event, it just really struck me that these people LOVE beer and have very much created a community around it as we have around wine.
I used to think that wine was far more social but I have to retract that statement. The beer community takes their beer very seriously and has made it a very social part of their lives. In fact, there seems to be less snobbery in the beer world than in the wine world but I could be wrong since I haven’t spent as much time on the beer side of things.
There were 40ish breweries at the event along with 20ish restaurants serving small bites. Many of the breweries brought special, hard to find beers; which was pretty cool and the Firestone Beer festival app even sent push notifications notifying you of what times different breweries were pouring some of these beers.
It was impossible to get to every brewery but I applaud anyone that did. The ones we made it to that I enjoyed were: The Lost Abbey, Mahr’s Brau Bamberg, Ballast Point, The Bruery (thanks to the infamous Bobby Fox for getting us behind the table to get some extra pours), Hollister Brewing, Brewery Ommagang, Revolution Brewing, Surly Brewing Co., and Triple Rock. Yo-Ho Brewing out of Nagano, Japan was interesting as well.
Aside from food and beer there were live bands most of the day and little seminars over the course of the day all about…BEER! Overall I really enjoyed the event again. For me it’s a nice break from all the wine related events we go to, which I love of course but a change of scenery is always nice. There’s nothing that I could really say to make this any better, I think the folks at Firestone are doing a great job and it’s been really cool to watch them grow and see other breweries starting up here locally.
I also think it’s vital to the growth of this area to have non wine related events like this one. It’s yet another reason for people to come visit Paso Robles but it also brings another group of people here to see what Paso is all about. As I stated above I am really becoming intrigued by the beer community and I look forward to getting involved even more. You would think I would become a winemaker or brewer with all that I drink but that spark hasn’t quite hit me yet…time will tell.
Other than that be sure to check out the video and slideshow below, we came across a woman who made a cool dress out of a bunch of those cardboard beer coasters…pretty damn cool. Cheers folks, I know it’s Monday but have a great week!!
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