Well, so maybe you couldn’t make it to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver last week. How would you like to go to the Great Canadian Beer Festival? Perhaps the Maine Brewers’ Festival in Portland, Maine or the Holiday Ale Festival in Portland, Oregon? What about the Great Welsh Beer & Cider Festival in Cardiff, Wales?

Back when I lived in New Jersey I attended the Garden State Craft Brewers Festival (when it was at Waterloo Village) and Great Brews of America a couple of times, but that was about it. Why not any others? I mean, they were really fun. How can you beat a dozen or many more brewers offering their wares to sample? Toss in some live entertainment, food vendors offering fare not even close to being healthy, and a huge crowd of fellow beer lovers and it’s like a little slice of heaven.

How do you find these festivals? What do you do when you’re looking at a hole in your social calendar and you’d be willing to drive a bit to get to a beerfest, but don’t know where one might be?

Well, your Uncle Al is here to help you out. Any given weekend there are probably half-a-dozen festivals going on throughout the world. If you want to find one near you, try either the Beer Advocate Events calendar or BeerFestivals.org.

BeerFestivals.org offers location, date, organizer information and festival highlights, with a link to the website for the festival. The list is surprisingly complete. For the last weekend in October alone there are 10 festivals listed in the United States, United Kingdom, and Mexico.

The BeerAdvocate calendar offers similar information, with the added feature of allowing BeerAdvocate users to indicate they’re attending. That way, you can meet up with other people from the community. It also provides something of a rating system, as one would expect that festivals attended by a lot of BeerAdvocates would be the better ones.

I tend to prefer the simpler and cleaner look of BeerFestivals.org, but both are well-maintained and just chock-full of data. Either should meet your needs for finding a beer festival to attend this weekend.

Related posts

• No related posts.