Do you miss the SF Beer Week Opening Gala? We do. In 2021, 2022 and 2023 Beer Week danced and pivoted, avoiding the beloved main event for both safety and economic reasons.
In the spring of 2023, the Brewers Guild resolved to hold the twelfth Gala in February 2024. The brewers of our region gambled on a healthy, thirsty future and secured Pier 35, one of the only local venues suitable to the scale of the event. The venue is costly, the vision is bold and the vision is epic.
And so it is that on February 9, Beer Week’s main event returns.
Brewers are excited:
BareBottle and Del Cielo brewers chime in for one minute during their collaboration brew day together, talking about sexy hops and the Gala.
Olfactory Brewing and Blending looks forward to taking the brewery’s debutant turn at the Gala. Phil has some special beers prepared.
New to the Gala, Hop Bay is on a mission to bring fresh faces to our brewing region’s collaborative mix. The Guild has made a commitment to offer support and encouragement for people traditionally under-represented in craft beer circles, and this year we’ll have a chance to easily explore what these passionate beer supporters and brewers have to offer, and to learn how to support this initiative.
Ghost Town is putting the finishing touches on some hop creations that sound clearly delicious… everybody has delights for the people!
We hope to get around and make more of these anticipatory one- minute clips, and add them into the post above as well as spreading them on social channels. We’d love it if you passed these little videos around as you’re gathering your friends to come to the Gala. It’s an ambitious (and financially risky) event as well as a famous one, and we want to see a tradition restored.
In 2010, Beer By BART captured some of the local brewers and publicans looking forward to the second year of SFBW. Beer journalist Jay Brooks collected links to many of our short vids 14 years ago, along with some more professional coverage of the initial Gala that year.
In this video, you may find familiar faces including some old friends no longer with us, like Tasty McDole, and some as central to the beer scene as ever, including Rob Tod (Allagash Brewing), Tomme Arthur (Lost Abbey Brewing) and Dave Keene (Toronado). Here’s our post-beer-week 2010 community appreciation roundup:
If it’s all new to you, join in. Use the Gala to meet up with old friends in the beer community, to circulate and spread the word about your own beer-related ideas or projects, or bring a group of pals who are not yet hardcore beer fans and tour them around in a moving party as they taste and explore. (There’s a group discount offer still up for the SFBW Gala, as of this posting.)
Here in the land where craft beer began, telling the stories and remembering this evolution matters almost as much as the flavors and the experiences we plan to savor together.
Explore Beer By BART: Use our acclaimed destination list of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places and their related transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.
Beer by BART 