Beer Run Blog

If you haven't heard yet about Denver Beer Fest, then let's just say this: You may want to clear out the next week of your calendar.

Visit Denver, the city's convention and visitors bureau, has assembled a lineup of roughly 150 events involving beer and food, beer and tappings, beer and trivia, beer and ice cream, hell, even beer and breasts. And between 5 p.m. today and sunset on Sunday, Sept. 27, there's a chance that if you plan things correctly, you may not have to do anything but drink beer for 10 days.

The idea of a celebration of a city's brewing industry isn't anything new: San Francisco and Philly have done it for a couple of years now. But what's impressive about the effort here in Colorado is the number of happenings they were able to set up in such a short time - Philly, for example, had about 60 events at its first beer week, Visit Denver officials tell me - and the variety of them. Brian Dunn, owner of Great Divide Brewing, noted that he's doing six beer dinners as well as about a dozen other events from tastings to meet-the-brewer gatherings before he collapses from sheer exhaustion in a week-and-a-half.

I've written about this several times for my real job (you can see the latest Internet article here but unfortunately have to be a subscriber to see the bigger story I wrote on the success of the Beer Fest and the Great American Beer Festival last week) and it's because it transcends the world of beer geeks. This is a chance for Bobby Blatz-chugger and Marty Miller-drinker who may not have found the full array of beer that is out there to stumble into a great beer and meet its brewer while out for dinner this week.

Rather than try to list all of the events, or even the highlights, I'll just go ahead and post a link to the full schedule here. But rest assured I'll be hitting dinners and new tappings and, yes, even trying some beer ice cream this week and trying to chronicle it (far more regularly than I have been) on this site.

And I've set my watch to 5:30 p.m. Thursday, for the start of the Great American Beer Festival. I imagine many of you have as well.