LA Beer Week is a marathon event. 10+ days of tastings, festivals, and pairing dinners can take a toll on your energy levels (and your wallet.) You don’t want to burn-out before the big finale at Union Station; you can always recharge your batteries and still celebrate LA Beer Week with a quite evening at home. It just takes a couple things to turn “moping at home” into your own awesome private Beer Week Celebration! 

You know that “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” song that incessantly plays on the radio come December to help ring in the string of end-of-year Hallmark holidays? Well, we’re calling on local radio stations to start putting it in the loop right now, since the 4th Annual LA Beer Week (Sept 20-30) is finally upon us!

What makes it the most wonderful time of the year, you ask? Well, besides the LA Beer Week Festival at Union Station, the vast array of commemorative prickly pear beers being made by local brewers, and the crazy sampling of events that we told you about, we’ve got a few more aces up our sleeves that we’d love to share with you!

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!

Wanna participate? Piece of cake. Just print out an LA Beer Week Bucket List from home and plot out your course using our fun-filled events calendar.

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.

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.
 

There are few hours left until the parade of tastings, pairings, pint nights, and pub crawls that is LA Beer Week begins, and LA’s craft beer fans are excited to start the party! But LA Beer Week isn’t just for people that already love craft beer. It’s also an opportunity to bring new fans into the fold and to teach people about the benefits, differences, and just plain awesomeness of craft beer.

Just posted to the untappd Tumblr… details on the official 2012 LA Beer Week Untappd badge! If you aren’t already using Untappd to check-in to your favorite beers, what are you waiting for? Now is the time! Download the FREE app by visiting untappd.com on your smartphone. Cheers!

Los Angeles and Orange County are about to erupt in an all out craft beer mad house as this year’s LA Beer Week quickly approaches. Starting September 20th and culminating September 30th with the LA Beer Week Festival, this year is sure to not disappoint. With tons of events spread across two counties, you’d better not miss a second of the action.

To top it all off, we’re happy to share with you the 2012 edition of the LA Beer Week badge! To unlock it, all you need to do is check-in to any beer at any location within Los Angeles and Orange County from September 20 through the 30th. Be sure to add your location to the check-in for it to count!

For a full list of events and all the details you could ask for, be sure to checkout LA Beer Week’s official site at labeerweek.com as well as follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

We hope to see you out there!

Ready? Set? Beer!

Get out there and participate in some of the awesome events and activities during LA Beer Week to celebrate our local craft beer scene and support our local breweries. Go to fun scheduled events, attend educational activities to learn about all things beer, and seek out specialty/rare beers that are around just for LA Beer Week. Doing any of these things gets you stickers for your LABW Bucket List, which gets you something awesome.

Unless you’ve been under a rock and/or ignoring our stellar press releases/blog posts, you should be more than aware that the 4th Annual LA Beer Week is nigh, taking place from September 20-30, 2012. And you’ve undoubtedly read about Unity (the official beer of LA Beer Week), and all the other prickly pear beers being made by local breweries, right? OK, good. Just checking.

Now, we’d like to draw your attention to some of the stellar events happening throughout this glorious 11-day period, which—as you of course know—culminates with the signature LA Beer Week Festival at Union Station. Here’s a rundown of some of the killer events taking place. To see all of them, simply click on each date to go to our calendar for that respective day. (How convenient, no?) 

How well do you know Los Angeles?  How often do you venture outside of your ‘hood?

L.A. Beer Week is the perfect excuse to visit pockets of the City of Angels that you don’t usually get off the freeway to see.  So, not only will you be raising your beer IQ but you will learn about the city as well. 

One of the many great features of the festival that closes out L.A. Beer Week is that you can try your hand at pairing the great beers that abound at Union Station with great chocolates from Mignon.

And this year, there are three new flavors debuting that should really test your skill to find a chocolate that brings out different flavors in the beer and beer styles that work in harmony with the chocolate.

With each passing year, the concept of a craft beer dinner becomes further ingrained into fine diners’ minds.  This year there are three beer dinners during L.A. Beer Week that I want to bring to the forefront of your mind.

To celebrate the 4th Annual LA Beer Week (Sept 20-30), several local brewers have brewed their own commemorative beers, all incorporating one special ingredient: prickly pears! Also known by their Spanish name, tuna, prickly pears are the edible and oh-so-tasty fruit from the Opuntia genus of cactus. Prickly pears have long been used as an ingredient in brewing, especially in Mexico, where they are used to create a traditional alcoholic beverage called colonche. Read up on the names and types of beers that will be all over Los Angeles for LA Beer Week 2012…