Bite At the Beach – Recap!
Pacific Gravity Signage
On May 17th Pacific Gravity took advantage of our first opportunity to pour beer under the 2013 law AB1425 that allows homebrewers to donate their precious homebrew @ a public event as long as that event is benefiting a non-profit organization. Matt McIvor reached out to our club to ask if we were interested and after many of you showed interest in donating and serving your beer to the public Pacific Gravity was signed up to pour beer.
We were also joined by a few brewers from Strand Homebrewers Club who brought along some meads and ciders to share as well.
I wanted to post some pictures for those of you who were in attendance, along with those of you who were unable to make the trip / pay the entry fee. Those of us who donated beer were allowed to enter the festival for free – which was really an awesome advantage. The event was a food and beer pairing event where every tent was 1 brewery and 1 restaurant. One of my personal favorite food pairings was the Brown Ale from King Harbor paired with a Smoked Clam Chowder – it was delicious!
The highlight of the entire event though was when our very own Terry Malloy and Rives Borland gave a homebrewing demonstration during the VIP hours. Due to ABC law we couldnt actually brew any beer, but we had an entire all grain setup with us along with some barley and hops to share with the festival attendees. Terry got up in front of the stage and gave a fantastic presentation while Rives walked around and shared the raw brewing ingredients with the crowd. I for one had a blast listening to Terry break down the science of homebrewing on the fly – it was a really special event.
The second really awesome part of the event is that we had 4 different beers on tap that were Monster Brews from Smog City. Adam Ward brought his Kolsch fermented with White Lab’s
Tad and Ramesh filling out the wave of beer.
Kolsch strain, Kingsley and I brought along our Kolsch fermented with East Coast Yeast’s Kolschbier, Terry Malloy brought along his batch which he had turned into an American Blonde Ale and Rives Borland / Jesse Tice brought their Brettanomyces Pilsner from the monster brew. It was really awesome to get to share those beers with the festival attendees and get to explain to them that all four beers were from the same batch.
We handed out numerous membership forms, along with a lot of membership pamphlets for Strand Brewers Club as well.
To those of you who donated your time and beer I just wanted to say thank you for both coming out and for the beer. I think PG was really well represented with the beers, meads and ciders we had on hand. To those of you who were unable to attend I hope you can make it out for the next event – I will be reaching out to future festivals to gauge their interest in our clubs involvement. I am hoping that with the next event we can organize our beers a bit more – maybe even choosing a list of beers that we would like to have on hand to pour before hand, rather than having it be a free for all in beer styles.
Cheers!
-Brian
