Saw this on the Craft Beer Chronicles and thought it should get another audience after bouncing around Facebook and Twitter last week.
These two timelines really show how young we are as a craft beer community. I sometimes feel impatient with the growth of breweries and bottle shops here in LA but I have to stop comparing to Portland and Denver and see that that most of the places that I frequent aren’t even 5 years old. We have to walk before we can run. And here is what I think we will need in the future to really make LA a beer destination.
1. More breweries. We are on the path and if the City of Los Angeles would just get the hell out of the way we could have a bumper crop in a couple years. A community of brewers will only create higher standards and more experimentation.
2. A couple specialty beer bars. We need a real ale establishment or a sour beer house or heck even a bar that serves out of town beers to all the LA people who came from someplace else. Maybe a movie house with taps like the Alamo Drafthouse.
3. More media coverage. I’m looking at you LA Times and KCRW’s Good Food.
4. A lot more summer beers. LA gets hot if you didn’t notice over the 4th of July weekend. We can’t be drinking high ABV Triple IPA’s and Barrel aged stouts. We need light session beers and pilsners and we need more of them in cans so the active set can take them to where they want to go.