Last year’s inaugural Seattle Beer Week was quite the party. But, this year the organizers are promising to deliver even more beery goodness during the second annual celebration, which starts Thursday, May 13, and runs through Sunday, May 23 (yep, it’s really 10 days).
What is the goal of Seattle Beer Week?
The goal of Seattle Beer Week is to celebrate and showcase the tight-knit beer community of the Northwest, especially the Seattle beer market. We have world class beers being brewed here as well as imports that are found nowhere else. We have world class bars and restaurants that specialize and care about the beer and food they serve. What better way to showcase this passion and love than to celebrate it for an entire week!
You should expect multiple events per day during the celebration, ranging from larger beer festivals at places like Brouwer’s to small tastings at local bottle shops like Full Throttle Bottles. You’ll want to make sure you start the week well-rested and make sure to bring your drinking shoes.
Here are a few things of note about this year’s Seattle Beer Week:
- Seattle Beer Week has officially partnered with the Seattle Weekly for advertising. This will give them access to a wide audience of readers outside of the usual craft beer circles, and it should really help in getting the word out about the week to a large % of the general Seattle population. One of the highlights of this partnership is that there will be a Seattle Beer Week program guide that will be included in every distributed copy of a certain issue of the Seattle Weekly.
- Hale’s Brewing will be crafting this year’s official Seattle Beer Week Commemorative Beer, and it will be an Imperial IPA of some sort. I’m a fan of their Super Goose and Aftermath Imperial IPAs, so this is definitely something to look forward to for. The opening ceremony will also be held at Hale’s this year. Last year, Pike Brewery unveiled their Double IPA as the first official Seattle Beer Week Beer, and it was a wonderful beer that will be released again this year (with more hops, according to Head Brewer Drew Cluley).
- They are looking into having the closing ceremony be a beer festival that would feature one-offs and unique beers from all over the world. There are no other details at this point, but more info should be available soon.
Hell no I’m not ready! There is still A LOT of work to do! Does anyone know what the weather is supposed to be like that first weekend?
http://www.phillybeerweek.org/
Pollack – get your own blog.
see, this goes back to the drink local conversation a few weeks ago,
were going to have a big seattle beer fest and the selected brewer is hale’s????? not a very good decision by the committee, why not g’town or elysian? or anyone but hale’s?
Why are you hating on Hales? What’s not local about Hales. The boys at Georgetown make fine beer but one of the desires of the cmtty as I understand it is that the Seattle Beer Week beer gets bottled and has a decent distribution throughout the region. G’town doesn’t currently bottle.
BTW – Pike Double IPA will hit the shelves later this month – and come it at the reduced price ( reduced from last year’s ) of $4.49 / you’ll even see it at $3.99 at some retailers. It will stick around into May when another seasonal from Pike will take it’s place.
Cheers,
Drew Cluley – Pike Head Brewer
Yeah I see no problem with Hale’s especially on the distro front…..can’t wait for this year’s beer week! Already had a pike double IPA as a primer..many more to come im sure..can’t wait for all the cool events in May tho…here is to WA craft beer!