The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. (You can find more information on The Session on Brookston Beer Bulletin).

We’re now midway through the month of March, and last Friday was March 6, Beer Blogging Friday. This was the date of The Session #97 – Up-and-Coming Beer Locations around the world.

For this month, I hosted The Session, and I asked the question:

What are the up-and-coming beer locations that you see as the next major players in the beer scene?

There were a number of great contributions to The Session this month featuring destinations around the world.

Europe

Lisa Grimm of Weird Beer Girl throws forth Copenhagen, Denmark, arguably the birthplace of modern industrial brewing, with its growing number of breweries and bottle shops. I wasn’t aware of the small brewery within Tivoli Gardens!

The Beer Nut touches a location near and dear to my heart for up-and-coming beer locations, Ireland! Here he shows how a short pub hop in Dublin can expose you to a number of new and interesting craft beers that are appearing from breweries around the Emerald Isle. I couldn’t agree more, based on my experience in Ireland in June for the 2014 European Beer Bloggers Conference.

Lars Marius Garshol reminds us on Larsblog that it takes more than just a few breweries making IPAs to make a destination up-and-coming. A truly great beer destination will offer a beautiful city and great food, as well as a unique style of beer.  Vilnius, Lithuania offers that with their farmhouse ales. Cheap prices and great bars help as well.

Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey of Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog wonders what criteria would be that would help to turn a location in the UK into the perfect location for an up-and-coming beer scene. Some interesting insights, including feedback from a local brewery on what they are looking for in a location they may want to expand into.

United States – East Coast

Sam Rozzi shares a post by Edmond Medina on Craft Carolina extolling the virtue of the beers of North Carolina. Edmond recently moved to the Charlotte, NC area from Richmond, VA and seems to be very pleased and enthusiastic about the beer scene in his new home state, from the mountains to the coast. There’s definitely more to the state than just Asheville, the host city for the 2015 Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference.

Jack Perdue goes deep about the Beers in Our Backyard on Deep Beer. You don’t always need to focus on the high rated whales of the world, high on everyone’s wish lists. Sometimes, you just need to look out your back door, and take another, appreciative look at the great beers that may be coming from your little neck of the woods. In his case, this would be Maryland.

Franz Hofer of A Tempest in a Tankard sees New York’s Finger Lakes region growing much more in the craft beer scene, as the region expands into more than its current main draws of lovely wines and beautiful scenery. A great resource to visiting the region for beer is included as well!

Dan of Community Beer Works in Buffalo, New York takes a deeper look into a neighborhood of his city, Larkinville, Buffalo. Sometimes, these micro-locations are the perfect breeding for micro-breweries.

United States – West Coast

Derek Peterman of Ramblings of a Beer Runner brings up the great point that great beer is stsrting to come from “EVERYWHERE” now, but stays close to home with the Silicon Valley of California. Despite being the home to some of the biggest names in brewpubs, the local beer scene was still stuck in a pretty quiet back seat to wine and semiconductors. But that’s definitely been changing of late, and you can find some excellent, and unpretentious beers there versus other nearby locales.

Nathan Pierce, who will be hosting The Session #98 on Micro Brewr, moves across San Francisco Bay to the East Bay for his up-and-coming location. With a mix of new small, medium, and large breweries opening on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, the East Bay is becoming a better place for beer!

Sean Inman of Beer Search Party brings us down to Southern California, not to the emerging Los Angeles or established San Diego, but to Orange County, home to a number of great breweries already.

Jon Abernathy on The Brew Site brings us to Redmond in Central Oregon, where the mix of current breweries and pubs along with a good business climate open to new breweries opening will lead to a continued growth in the beer scene there.

And in General

Will Gartrell of vonSchlapper’s Adventures With Beer was reminded on a recent trip to the UK that the next great beer destination is the next destination you’ll be visiting. And Alan McLeod brings it to a conclusion on A Good Beer Blog as he reminds us that good beer can be found everywhere these days. When you travel, be sure to experience the destination, as those memories may be just as enjoyable as the beer.

My Thoughts

I will admit, I was a little surprised not to see any mention of East Asia or South America on the radar for up-and-coming locations. Recent news has indicated that there is a huge growing craft beer scene in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, while the craft beer scenes in Japan and Brazil have been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years. I’m personally extremely excited to try some of the beers coming out of these locations. And of course, the continued growth of the craft beer scene throughout Europe and North America leads to very exciting times for all of us!

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. (You can find more information on The Session on Brookston Beer Bulletin).

Do you want to know a secret?

I know I do! And I hope you’ll share your secret with the rest of us.

The topic for this month’s session is up-and-coming beer locations.

We all have our favorite beer locations. Some have been around for centuries. Others have made such a name for themselves in the past 25 years, they have reached beer-legend status and are ranked up there with the “old-world” beer destinations.

Belgium, Germany, and the Czech Republic are pretty-much synonymous with beer, especially in line with the basic styles that originated in their breweries centuries ago.

Within the United States, you have “old-world” cities such as Milwaukee, WI, as well as “new-world” cities such as San Diego, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, Portland, OR, and Asheville, NC more well-known for their experimental craft breweries.

But one thing that has become more apparent than ever in recent years, the craft beer scene is growing around the world, even faster than ever before!

Take a look at the offerings at any beer festival around the world, and you will find more craft brewers than you would have imagined. And when you look at where they’re from, the locations may often surprise you!

What are the up-and-coming beer locations that you see as the next major players in the beer scene?

For this month’s session, I’m asking you all to share which locations you see as the beer destinations that everyone will be talking about in the next few years.  Where are the beer scenes just emerging, or coming into their own? Some may be brand new locations. While others may be old-world destinations seeing a renaissance into the world of new craft beer styles.  Some may even be locations where familiar names from around the world are planning on setting up shop to bring new styles to old palates.

To participate in the current Session, just write a post on the topic of up-and-coming beer locations, and leave a comment here with a link to your post on or before March 6th, and I will include it in my Round-up. If you don’t have a beer blog but still want to participate, use the hashtag #session97 and I’ll try to include microblog/social media inputs with that hashtag as well.

It looks like the host slot for the April session is still open, so if you’re interested in hosting The Session #98, drop a note to Jay (.) Brooks (@) gmail (.) com or Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer. His e-mail is stan (@) appellationbeer (.) com.

I love them! Over the course of the past year, I’ve been to quite a few beer festivals.

A couple of these were beer festivals I managed to participate in while I was in San Diego for the first four months of 2015, but the vast majority were here in the Netherlands. During the late summer months, it seems that there were multiple beer festivals to choose from almost every weekend!

Some of these festivals are small, local events. Almost every village in my area of the Netherlands had a beer festival during the summer months. Most notable for me this year were the smaller festivals I attended in Oisterwijk, Valkenswaard, and the Biereloth festival run by my local pub in Boxtel every September. The nearby village of Haaren also had a winter beer festival in December, which was an exciting change of pace.

Some of the bigger cities in the Netherlands also have their own beer festivals, such as the festival I attended in the summer in Delft. You can also find larger festival in Brussels and even a wandering festival through major cities in Germany.

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Beautiful day for a beer fest.

A post shared by Brett Domue (@metsbwd) on Aug 31, 2014 at 4:33am PDT

Most of these festivals are fairly casual affairs in the center of town, with a mixture of beer aficionados and just general locals who were out for one or two samples.

Some of the festivals are definitely more for the beer geeks among us.  The Winterbierfestival in Gouda in January, the Brewda beer festival in Breda in September are two examples of some of the more local beer festivals geared more towards the true beer lovers.  But then there are the more major international festivals as well, which take it to the next level.  Boerefts Beer Festival in Bodegraven, put on each year by Brouwerij de Molen brings out a world class line-up of breweries, and the annual Zythos beer festival in Leuven, Belgium, features a huge selection of breweries from Belgium, and draws crowds even including buses from the UK!

The good thing about most of the festivals here in Europe is that they are easily accessible for everyone. Unlike the festivals I have attended in the US where you pay a fixed price for admission, and then find yourself trying to sample enough different beers to feel like you received a proper return on your admission, these are basically free to attend.  You pay for a glass, most of which can be refunded if you return the glass in the end, and you pay for tokens or chips which you then exchange per sample.  Typically these will cost around €1 – 2.50 per token, depending on the festival. You only pay for as many beers as you want to taste!

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Quite the crowd at Brewbies Festival 2014 in Oceanside. And some great beers too.

A post shared by Brett Domue (@metsbwd) on Mar 1, 2014 at 2:54pm PST

So why do I love Beer Festivals?

I supposed there are a couple of reasons why I love beer festivals.

Beer festivals allow you to meet the brewers

Most of the beer festivals I attend, each brewery has their own booth, which is often manned by the brewers themselves. You have an opportunity, crowd permitting, to have a chat with the man or woman behind the beer, and get to know them as well as their passion and process behind the beer

Beer festivals help you meet other beer lovers

When you attend a beer festival, you are amongst friends.  Most people there share a passion with you, the love of beer.  At a beer festival, you have an opportunity to meet with other beer lovers and discuss the beers you are trying, and get tips and information on where else to try the beers you would love to find.  With the emergence of smartphone apps such as untappd, it is even possible to see who else you know may also be attending the festival, or which beers they have enjoyed or are enjoying at the festival.  I’ve met a number of people I had been following on untappd at festivals this summer, and have since attended others festivals with some of them later on.

Beer festivals let you try more beers

Much like the benefit you get from trying beers at the source, at a beer festival, you get to try a greater variety of beers. And the added benefit of a festival is that you also get to try a variety of beers from a number of different producers.  While unlike a brewery visit where you may get to try 10 or more beers from a single brewery, at most festival, you’ll have 20 or more brewers, each with two to five different beers from which you can choose to sample.  And again, with the smaller pours and lower prices than for a bottle or a pint at a time, you can spread your beer capacity across a winder spectrum of styles and brewers.

Beer festivals help the industry

The last benefit of festivals I’ll point out is the way the festivals help the local beer industry. By setting up at beer festivals, many of the smaller breweries that may not have the huge distribution channels or marketing budgets have an opportunity to set up alongside all of the other breweries, and showcase their beers to the beer appreciating public. This is great for smaller breweries to gain the exposure and a following to help the industry to grow.

This article is written in participation with Session #96, hosted by Joan Villar-i-Martí on Birraire. The Session is a monthly event for the beer blogging community which was started by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer. On the first Friday of each month, all participating bloggers write about a predetermined topic. Each month a different blog is chosen to host The Session, choose the topic, and post a roundup of all the responses received. For more info on The Session, check out the Brookston Beer Bulletin’s archive page.

Then came the Kulminator.

After my fateful visit in May, 2005, I had a new Belgian love – Belgian Sour Beers.

My first Belgian sour beer was also one of the best Belgian sour beers out there, the Rodenbach Grand Cru. It’s a good thing too, because when I took my first sip, I didn’t know that I had ordered a sour beer, and a lesser beer may have turned me off of the style entirely.

I had recently discovered the beer site RateBeer, and made it my mission to find and try as many beers as possible from their list of the best Belgian beers. I didn’t look into the styles or descriptions, I just wanted to try them all!  I carried that list with me everywhere, and was always on the lookout for beers I could tick off of it.  When I sat down in the Kulminator that day, I knew I’d be marking off a couple, and chose the Rodenbach Grand Cru for the first off my list that day.

Whoa!

I was still relatively new to the Belgian beer scene, and hadn’t done a lot of research into the different styles available.  I assumed the beer would be similar to the other Belgian beers I had been enjoying in the Netherlands. When that first sip hit my tongue, I had no clue what I was in for! The sour hit my tongue like a hammer, and at first I thought it was a bottle gone bad.  This can’t be beer, can it? I asked, and yes, this is what the beer was supposed to taste like, so I decided I would keep drinking and see why it had made the top-50 list.  By the end of the glass, I was in love.

What are Belgian Sour Beers?

Sour beers are achieved when the brewer allows wild yeast strains, such as Brettanomyces, to enter into the brewing process.  For Belgian sour beers, the brewers often allow the yeast to enter through the barrels, or while sitting in giant cooling tanks during the brewing process.

Popular styles of Belgian Sour Beers include Flanders Red Ale, such as the Rodenbach beers including the Grand Cru and Vintage, as well as the lambic and gueuze style beers from the area around Brussels, such as those brewed by Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen and Oud Beersel.

This post is part of The Sessions #91, a series of beer blogs on a similar topic.  This month’s session is hosted by Belgian Smaak, and is themed around “My First Belgian”.