Picks of the Week – Looking Back at LA Beer Week 2012

By John Michael Verive on October 1st, 2012

We did it! We survived LA Beer Week 2012, and oh the stories we’ll tell about it. The events! The beers! The people! It seems like just about everyone had a great time, and everyone also seems about ready to wave goodbye to LABW for another year. Let’s take a look at some favorite beers and events of the 10-day long celebration.

LA Beer Week 2012

That was a marathon! We tried nearly an uncountable number of beers over the last 11 days, but even better than the beers were the people. It’s the people who make LA Beer Week special, from the awesome team who put it all together, to the organizers of the individual events, to all the great craft beer fans that were celebrating , the number of great people we met and chatted with was far more important than the number of different beers we tried!

The Events

Beer Week was nonstop with can’t-miss events scheduled for every day! Our scheduled hasn’t looked that full in ages! Some of our favorite events of LABW 2012 were:

While not technically part of Beer Week, the Woman’s Beer Forum at Eagle Rock Brewery was a great way to kick-off the week and preview all the special prickly pear beers made for LA Beer Week.
Wurstkuche Venice held a pair of Homebrewing demos that paired great insight into classic German styles and oh-so-delicious sausages!
The Open House preview of the Stone Brewing Company Store in Pasadena was a real treat, and we are very excited to have an official Stone outlet in Los Angeles, (and mere steps from the Gold Line too!)
Golden Road Brewing’s 1st Anniversary party, the ironically named Better Weather Fest, was well-run and a ton of fun!
The Ancient Ales dinner at Little Bear was the most memorable food+beer experience that we’ve had in a long time! Delicious and inspiring!
The Food GPS Beer Float Showdown was another great food+beer event, and the competition was fierce this year! We’ll be covering the event a little later on this week.
And of course the closing festival was three-scoops of fun in a two-scoop bag! So many beers, so many people, and so much awesome.

In addition to the organized events we attended we made sure to squeeze in some more ad-hoc beer activities, Some nice meals and some good bottles shared with friends made for a couple of more relaxed LABW evenings ensuring that we didn’t burn-out!

The Beers

There were far, far too many exemplary beers over that last 11 days to mention, but this is a Pick of the Weekend post, so I’ll just mention a few highlights:

My love of Eagle Rock Brewing’s UNITY should not be a secret. This beer is everything that I want in a hot-weather refreshing session beer. Bottles have made it out to shops around town, and I’ll be hoarding as much as possible!
The beers of El Segundo Brewing Co continue to impress me. Their White Dog IPA is one of my favorite made-in-LA beers right now, and their entry into the beer-float competition, which used the white IPA and a simcoe hop sorbet, was really creative and well done.
Haven Brewing’s Beer Week prickly pear beer was a great take on a hefeweizen that was a great refresher in the blazing sun of the Union Station festival.
The Lost Abbey Cuvee de Tomme is a delicious wild ale that could give the Russian River sours a run for their money.
Super IPA is a heralded recent release in New Belgium’s Lips of Faith line that is a collaboration with the cult favorite hop-wizards from Alpine Brewing, and the double IPA lived up to the hype. One of the most citrus-forward IPA’s I’ve ever had the pleasure of savoring; I’ll have my eyes-out for another elusive bottle!