Feb. 19 marks the start of Arizona Beer Week, a statewide celebration of craft brewers and their beers.
Spearheaded by the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild, Beer Week will include more than 300 different events and dozens of craft breweries. The idea is to celebrate small breweries that often get left out of mainstream drinking.
According to the Brewers Association, craft brewers are independent, brew malt beers and produce less than 6 million barrels of beer annually. As of 2008, craft brewers made up only four percent of total U.S. beer sales.
“Basically it’s the antithesis of the traditional Bud, Coors, Miller,” said Jerry Gantt, executive director of the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild.
Gantt said the idea for Beer Week came up last fall after observing successful events in other cities such as Philadelphia and San Diego. He said it’s all about getting Arizona in touch with their local breweries.
“We try to encourage people to be, not snobby, but at least intellectually curious as to what craft beer is all about,” said Gantt, who was a craft brewer himself for 18 years.
The week is a long awaited arrival for some brewers.
“I’ve been wanting to do a beer week in Phoenix for years now,” said Andy Ingram, the head brewer at Four Peaks Brewing Company.
A 1991 ASU graduate and football player, Ingram has watched the craft beer culture grow for years.
He originally brewed beer in college by himself, and the summer before heading off to grad school he worked in a brewery scrubbing tanks at the now closed Coyote Springs.
“(At the time) it was darn near impossible to get a craft beer on draft here. Now people are a lot more welcoming to it,” said Ingram, who has been a brewer for 17 years.
Ingram says that Four Peaks has a lot of specialty brews for the week including barley wines and a barrel-aged black ale. He has even worked alongside seven other breweries to create Four Peaks’ version of a “double red” called Diablo Rojo, which is “a cross between a red ale with a little more caramel character and an IPA.”
One particularly brow-raising Beer Week event is the Keg and Eggs Breakfast Feb. 20 hosted at about 20 restaurants statewide.
“People don’t normally associate beer with breakfast, but it’s actually a great combination,” said Ty Largo, a spokesman for Arizona Beer Week. “Sometimes you need a little beer in the morning to recover from the night before.”
To see the events and buy tickets, go to arizonabeerweek.com.
Contact the reporter at sbauge@asu.edu
