Art Of Beer Invitational

This is for the January 2015 festival.
Really fantastic brew-​fest. Over 40 regional brewers showing their best stuff. Five or six very good restaurants including Mikuni’s and Blackbird serving up delicious food like sashimi, oysters, pizza, sliders, & bratwurst.
Unlimited beer pours and as much food as you can eat in a very comfortable setting. A great local art show, with most of it relevant to the beer community. Fun music, great set-​ups by the different breweries, games to play, prizes to win, lots of interesting folk to have fun with.
Truly great beer & cider flowing all around. Beautiful art to gawk at and be inspired by and possibly purchagse. Some great buys for local collectors. A great evening.
The only downside is the location, which for us turned into a $ 30 lyft ride home. The hall is beautiful though — a great space for a fun time like this.

A fairly well organized event at a beautiful location for a worthy cause. I think I discovered more amazing and up-​and-​coming microbreweries in one hour here than I did in the last year, and that says a lot since I’m quite the beer enthusiast.
The venue of choice, the California Aerospace Museum, has a lot of advantages because of its space, open and airy feel and beautiful aircraft to admire. On this particular night they would not allow us to go outside to view the rest of the planes, which is something I distinctly remember I was allowed to do at other festivals here. Each vendor was friendly and some of the pours were more than generous. The atmosphere was lively and became crowded in the final hours, but it was easy to slip upstairs and people watch from the second floor if the crowds weren’t your thing.
My biggest criticism is reserved for the «VIP Rare Beer Hour.» For a significantly higher cost of $ 100 per ticket, you got to get in an hour early and supposedly taste rare beers — many of which are not even available off the factory floor. Half of that first hour was wasted standing in a long line, there was no private section for rare beer tasting and many of the vendors didn’t even have a rare beer option. I’d probably be more disappointed in this if the event as a whole didn’t turn out to be such a thirst quenching success.

Thanks to Unilocal and my sweetie John H. we had free tix to this event. We arrived at 6pm and there was a long line already but about 15mins later we were in. The space was large enough to accommodate everyone and the various booths comfortably. I was impressed with all the great beer choices and the generous pours from every one of them. Plus, the lines weren’t too long which was a surprise. The ones that had a long line seemed to go pretty fast. Some of my favorite beers were from Beryessa, Bear Republic, American River in Ranch Cordova, Triple Rock from Berkley, and … the list goes on.
Ok, it wasn’t all about the beer, right? There’s only so much beer you can have without eating something. The choices were sausage by Sierra Nevada, stroganoff (see pic), a stew like dish served by The Shack, and pizza. Yummy!
Overall it was a great event!

Cheers!
A fest dedicated to all things brewed, with delicious tastes of sausages, pastas, cheeses and stews to fortify the soul.
Hopefully other Unilocalers will fill in the details on this lager-​than-​life event! So many breweries we didn’t get to them all.
The pluses: bathrooms upstairs and downstairs. Large event space. Brewers sociable and generous with their explanations, and their pours. Delicious food. The lines were short so we didn’t have to spend all her time waiting around for food or drinkl
The minuses: a 15-​minute line at the beginning — but that irritation quickly wore off as we sipped and slurped our way to beer nirvana!
Solid 4 star event!