Beer festivals are a great way to try new beers, meet brewery representatives and travel to new places and they’ve come a long way from the days of drinking beers in parking lots.
Many beer festivals nowadays are not just about the beer and have seminars, food, culture, music, art and more.
In this episode, we talk to two beer festival planners, Day Bracey, who runs Barrel and Flow in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Laura Lodge, who ran Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines in Breckenridge, Colorado. They talk about what goes into making a beer festival a success, some difficulties facing festival planning, and the future of beer festivals.
This Episode is Sponsored by:
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Em Sauter
Em Sauter is an Advanced Cicerone®, cartoonist, author, beer reviewer, international beer judge and public speaker who runs the award winning website Pints and Panels, which focuses on visual beer education. Her first book "Beer is for Everyone! (of Drinking Age)" was published in 2017 by One Peace Books. Her second book "Hooray for Craft Beer!" was released in April 2022 with Brewers Publications. Em is also co-host of the All About Beer Podcast. She lives in New England with her husband Matt and two cats- Milbo and The Geen.
Don Tse
Living near seven malthouses, Don Tse is a freelance beer and malt writer and consultant known globally as The Don of Beer. He has been active in craft beer for over 25 years and has famously sampled and written tasting notes on almost 27,000 different beers. He is the co-host of the All About Beer podcast. Don has also written for magazines and presented on beer in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ukraine and Singapore. Nobody in those countries thinks his jokes are funny.