California Beer Month?

February used to mean cold weather, no more football and frankly, not much in the eager-anticipation department. But that situation has changed over the past two decades — and Bay Area beer lovers will want to start penciling dates into next month’s calendar.

What began as the tiny Toronado Barleywine Festival — a one-day event 19 years ago with half-a-dozen barley wines — has grown into a weeklong celebration featuring more than 60 different brews from across the nation. It’s one of the biggest such beer festivals anywhere, and without a doubt the original. This year’s Barleywine Festival will open its doors on Feb. 18.

Anticipating the meteoric rise in the popularity of hoppy beers, the Bistro in Hayward launched its Double IPA Festival 11 years ago. That festival helped put Imperial India Pale Ales — as they’re also known — on the map. Today it’s a recognized beer style with its own judging category at the Great American Beer Festival and other competitions. The Bistro Double IPA Festival, the original start to SF Beer Week, will be held this year on Feb. 11.

And this year also marks the 10th anniversary of the wonderfully named Strong Beer Month. Every February, San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery and Restaurant and the Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery each brew up half-dozen special beers, all of them quite strong, of course. Try all 12 over the course of the month — before they run out — and you’ll get to keep the

commemorative glass.

Enter SF Beer Week

So when the Celebrator Beer News, the local beer magazine I was running with publisher Tom Dalldorf, hit its 15th anniversary in 2003, we celebrated with a “Beerapalooza” of events that filled in the days between the Double IPA and Barleywine Festivals. It proved such a rousing — and repeat — success that it eventually turned into SF Beer Week in 2009.

That year, Dalldorf and I got together with Dave McLean from Magnolia, Shaun O’Sullivan from 21st Amendment, “Beer Chef” Bruce Paton and Dave Keene from the Toronado to craft the new festival with a lot of hard work and a shoestring budget. I think a lot of people thought we were crazy.

Today, the festival is sponsored by the San Francisco Brewers Guild and more than two dozen breweries, as well as Whole Foods, Brewers Supply Group and several area bars and beer stores, The fourth SF Beer Week will begin Feb. 10. The opening celebration, which features 50-plus breweries pouring their most unusual beers alongside the classics that made them famous, has been moved to larger quarters at San Francisco’s Concourse Exhibition Center.

The 2011 festivities included more than 250 beer events over 10 days, and this year’s should be at least as rich in things to do, places to go, food to savor and beer to enjoy from Feb. 10 to 19. When I spoke to McLean, who is in charge of the opening celebration, about how things have changed since the first year, he says he believes the event has hit “a much deeper recognition level — with craft beer up 16 percent last year, and all signs pointing to craft beer hitting critical mass, we’re now on everybody’s radar.”

SF Beer Week has, in effect, “changed the weather,” McLean says, through the “power of the beer community.” What once was the slowest month for Bay Area beer-related businesses has become the best.

For details on this year’s events, check out the SF Beer Week website at http://sfbeerweek.org and download the free iPhone or Android app.

California Beer Month?

For the past seven years, the state Legislature has declared September “California Wine Month.” Now February may become “California Beer Month,” giving us one more reason to celebrate next month. Insiders tell me it’s not a done deal, but the paperwork is winding its way through the halls of power in Sacramento and soon may land on the governor’s desk.

It would be the official recognition that the craft beer industry in California deserves. In a down economy, it’s one of the few bright spots. In 2010, California’s beer industry was behind nearly 230,000 jobs and more than $10 billion in wages, and it generated more than $33 billion for our state economy, according to National Beer Wholesalers Association statistics.

But officially or not, February really has become California Beer Month. If you’re a lover of great beer, California is the place to be in February.

Contact Jay R. Brooks at [email protected]. Read more by Brooks at www.ibabuzz.com/bottomsup.

All About Beer with Bill & Sheila
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