With a re-shuffling of personal finances that would make Bernard Madoff stand up and slowly applaud it’s finally done – I’ve booked flight tickets to San Francisco and the Craft Brewers Conference this March!
Attending this event is something I’ve been wanting to do for years so please, just for a moment, humour me as I shout in words: San Francisco Baby! Hell Yeah!!!!
That’s so much better. Sorry about that. I came over all American for a moment there. The fact is however that I am ecstatic to be going across the Atlantic to see first hand what all this fuss is about with their beers.
As I recently wrote US craft beer continues to have a major influence on the way the Swedish beer scene is developing right now. A lot of the beer trends started over there eventually end up over here so I figured why not go straight to the source to find out what’s going on?
Those very nice people at the Brewers Association have already approved BeerSweden’s media credentials so I’ll be attending the show as a member of the press, which will hopefully make it easier for me to interview some of the brewers behind your favourite US craft beers and tour the conference tracking down new beer trends.
I’m also planning to get along to a couple of local microbreweries as well as some of the amazing brewpubs and beer bars San Francisco is famous for.
I’ll of course be blogging the entire trip, keeping you up-to-date with all the beery goings-on and even hope to do a spot of live streaming from within the conference hall itself to give you a rare insiders glimpse into the heart of the booming US craft beer industry.
But why the Craft Brewers Conference and not the Great American Beer Festival some of you might ask? Isn’t the CBC like a really big gathering of people selling steel pipes, silicon tubing and nipples (the valves, not the other kind) rather than, well, beer?
The answer is both yes and no. The CBC is the largest industry event for the craft beer community in the USA and so there are lots of companies there that provide the equipment that helps get the US beers you enjoy so much to your local Systembolaget.
But the CBC is also a wonderful meeting point for brewers and beery figureheads and represents an annual opportunity for the craft beer community to swap notes, update kit, check out the competition or simply just hang out with fellow beer fanatics without the insane numbers of festival goers the GABF attracts.
I promised you 2011 was going to be an amazing year of beer didn’t I!
(Despite all this good news I have to record my enormous frustration over the bizarre truth that it’s far easier for BeerSweden to gain acceptance and be treated as a member of the media in the USA than it is right here in Sweden. Just goes to prove the USA beer community has for several years recognised and embraced new media while some elements of the drinks industry in Sweden still view it with suspicion and distrust. Time to wake up I say, because I really think this Internet thing is here to stay).







