before L.A. Beer Week starts

As if L.A. Beer Week needed to be any more fun, here are 3 more ale-ventures to accomplish between the 20th and 30th this month.

From the fine folks behindL.A. Beer Week:

1. CAPS FOR CAPS INITIATIVE
We’ve got some awesome local breweries with some beautiful looking bottle caps emblazoned with their logos. Homies like Eagle Rock Brewery, Hangar 24 Craft Brewery, The Bruery, Black Market Brewing, and Brouwerij West. If you can collect a dozen of those bottle caps, you can trade em in for an official LABW hat at the LA Beer Week Festival. (Hat = cap. Bottle cap. Caps for Caps… see what we did there?)

And for those local breweries who aren’t yet marking their bottle caps with their logo, we’ve partnered with local bottle shops/LABW sponsors to place special stickers on those caps to help spread the love and make this little program even more of a happy success. Look for the stickers at these fine potent potable purveyors:

Wally’s Wine and Spirits (West LA)
K&L Wine Merchants (Hollywood)
The Oaks Gourmet Market (Los Feliz)
Red Carpet Wine (Glendale)
Co-Opportunity (Santa Monica)

If for some unknown reason you aren’t attending the LA Beer Week Festival, you can bring said 12 caps to Eagle Rock Brewery or Beer Belly to claim your superfly sombrero.

2. THE LA BEER WEEK BUCKET LIST
As an added incentive to head out to multiple events this year (as if the events themselves weren’t incentive enough), we’ve devised the brilliant LA Beer Week Bucket List to help steer you in a few adventurous directions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to collect special stickers by participating in certain types of events: visiting local breweries, attending a beer education seminar, moseying out to one of our highlighted shindigs, and seeking out an extra special, rare beer. Those who complete this most noble quest, collecting all four stickers and bringing their finished Bucket List to the LA Beer Week Festival are then entitled to a bottle of the official LABW beer, Unity, from Eagle Rock Brewery! It also gets you into a drawing for free tickets to the amazing BAM Fest (Beer, Art, and Music) on Oct. 6th in Santa Monica!

3. LA BEER WEEK BADGE ON UNTAPPD
The true craft beer cognoscenti are using Untappd to check-in to their favorite beers, a newfangled 21st century kind of way to drink socially, if you will. Users of the free app can receive the official Untappd LA Beer Week badge simply by checking into any beer between Sept. 20-30, with their location geotagged anywhere within Los Angeles or Orange County. Not using Untappd yet? Well, what are you waiting for?! Head to untappd.com on your smartphone to get started.

Two Twists to L.A. Beer Week


It is now September and the celebration of all things craft beer in L.A. starts in less than three weeks!

This year there will be two special programs running during the extended week. First is a L.A. Beer Week passport. And anyone who is considering or has already bought tickets for the finale festival at Union Station should get in on this. All you have to do is have fun and drink beer at four types of LA Beer Week events. Visit a brewery. Get a sticker for your passport. Attend a special beer event. Get another sticker for your passport. And if you complete this mission (not impossible by the way), all you have to do is turn in your completed passport at the Union Station festival to receive a token for a $1 bottle of Unity 2012. Seriously! One Dollar for a full bottle of Prickly Pear Rye Berliner Weisse.

Secondly is “Caps for Caps”! A fun bottle cap hunt. Visit participating bottle shops in the L.A. area and pick up a beer from the cooler that has the LA Beer Week sticker on it. Or save a bottle cap from a brewery based here in L.A. County. Collect 12 and you can turn them in for a rockin’ LA Beer Week hat either at the festival or at Beer Belly or Eagle Rock Brewery. (Where they have really great beer that tastes even better with the “official” hat on.)

More information on these special promotions will be coming shortly including the link to print a passport and a list of the stores that will be participating in “Caps for Caps”.

Thanks in advance for talking about L.A. Beer Week on your blogs, your Twitter feeds or Facebook pages and get as many people out to events as you can. And please pass the information on to anyone who you think would benefit from it and/or can spread the word to people not “inside” the craft beer world.