It took me three years to finally make my first appearance at the L.A. Craft Beer Crawl. An ode to craft beer and downtown L.A. that is spearheaded by the Beer Chicks.
The crawl covers seven venues from 6th street stretching south to Olympic and Flower and there was a wide variety of beers including some new breweries and beers that I hadn’t encountered previously.
There were two tiers for tickets. You could get the VIP treatment and two extra hours and access to limited availability beers or you could shell out a little less cash and get your glass at 3pm. I ventured down the stairs to Casey’s Irish Pub on the stroke of 1pm and caught Rich Marcello from Strand tapping a cask with the help of the first customer in line. A wildly aromatic Citra IPA.
But my first beer of the day was from Anchor. It was Zymaster # 2 – Mark’s Mild and it was a really great way to not only open the drinking day but a really nice and zippy brown. Made me long for the # 1 which I have yet to taste.
Before leaving Casey’s (truth be told, I only got to 4 of the 7 bars) I sampled a wine barrel aged beer from Lake Elsinore’s Craft Brewing Company. And it was quite good. A nice wine kick that didn’t overpower the beer. I will be on the look out for more of their beer.
My standouts of the day also included the Black Butte 24 from Deschutes or practically anything Deschutes had because they had the Hair of the Dog collaboration Conflux # 1 there as well as their White IPA, Chainbreaker. The Sand Dune Sage from El Segundo was great and also at Cana Rum Bar was Kinetic Brewing’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Time which was really well done. Nicely balanced and not just a novelty beer.
Then I headed back to the world of air conditioning for two seminars. One led by Dave Watrous on sours which included a lovely Oud Gueze from Timmerman’s and the other on Italian beer led by Tomm Carroll which was quite exotic with a carob beer, a curry beer and a beer made with gentian which was my favorite of the group.
It was great to see so many people out enjoying craft beer and minus a few hiccups, my experience was of a well run event which is hard to do when stretched over many city blocks. Some of the volunteers didn’t have information but all were unfailingly polite and would point out people who knew more. There was water available to go or at each venue which is a necessity on hot days. My only quibble was that the seminars could have been better located with more signage pointing the way to where they were to be held and also, this is my big bugaboo, if you are having speakers, they need to be heard. So put them into quieter areas.
But the main review has to be of the beer choices available and this was well covered. Mostly local based but with fine additions and not just regular flagship beers (not that those are bad, but you need a mix). So on that metric the Beer Chicks did exemplary work.
Cheers to Roy and Gabriel from Beers in Paradise who shared the journey with me as well as to Rich and Efrain at the Strand booth. It was great to see Lee from Eagle Rock Brewing and the Hot Knives were also in attendance.