Short Pours - 10/9/14
Booktoberfest - 10/10
The Kansas City Library is relaunching their Young Friends of the Library group with a new beer event in town called Booktoberfest. The event is a celebration of beers & books at the downtown library this Friday from 6:30p - 10p. From Andy Dandino with the library:
We wanted to create a beer tasting experience that was different than the traditional beer festival – something a bit more intimate and relaxed. The way we've planned Booktoberfest limits the number of available tickets so that guests won’t have to stand in long lines for a brew sample – they'll be organized into small groups and rotate among four tasting stations located throughout the Central Library. Guests will be able to spend almost a half hour at each beer station, listening to the brewers talk about their 2-3 featured beers and brewing processes, and they'll have a chance to take part in some Q&A.The brewers coming to the event include KC Bier Co, Cinder Block, Crane Brewing, and Rock & Run. Food at the event will be provided by Farm to Market Bread Company, Cosentino's Downtown Market, and Swoon Cookies. Tickets are $35/each, which gets you the beer, the food, and a commemorative tasting glass (you need another one of those, don't you!). The proceeds benefit the Young Friends of the Library group.
We already included a couple of the Oktoberfests this weekend in our guide, but there's another one that didn't make the list. Oktoberfest KC is a new Oktoberfest for the area hosted by the Brew Society in the Berg Event Space in the Crossroads. The event is going to run from 1p-5p this Sunday and feature local KC breweries including Boulevard, KC Bier Co, McCoy's, Rock & Run, Martin City, and Crane. The Flying Saucer will be providing German cuisine for sale at the event (German cuisine = brats and pretzles. Yea!). You can get tickets in advance for $20, or $25 at the door, which will get you beer & a commemorative tasting glass (you need another one of those, don't you!). Proceeds benefit the KC Pet Project.
Beerfest at the Ballpark - 10/18
Another new beer fest has also popped up out by the Legends this year organized as a fundraiser for Helpful Hands KC. It's called Beerfest at the Ballpark, and it's going to be held in the T-Bones stadium (er...Community America Ballpark?) on Saturday, October 18 from 1:30p-5p. It looks to be a pretty standard beer fest with a solid list of breweries attending, and a $35 admission ticket. You even get a commemorative tasting glass with this one (you need another one of those, don't you!). Here's a list of the breweries attending the fest:
75 Street Brewery Abita Anderson Valley Batch 19 Blue Moon Brewing Co. Boston Beer Boulder Boulevard Brewing Breckenridge Bridgeport Crispin Cidery Ciderboys Deschutes Empyrean Evil Twin | Free State Goose Island Granite City Green Flash Grolsch Heineken USA High Noon Saloon Killians Left Hand Brewery Leinenkugel's Brewing Co. Lost Coast Molson Canadian New Belgium North Coast Odell | Ofallon Oskar Blues Peroni Nastro Azzuro Pilsner Urquell Redd’s Ale Schlafly Shiner Shock Top Sierra Nevada Smith & Forge Stillwater Tallgrass Third Shift Woodchuck |
New Beers in Town
There's been a bunch of new beer releases lately and new breweries moving into town that I've been remiss for not telling all you fine folks about! So lets do the lightning round!
Boulevard Bourbon Barrel Quad - On shelves as of Tuesday this week. This year its all barrel aged goodness, as opposed to previous years where some non-barrel aged 6th Glass was blended back in.
Boulevard Za'tart - This beer is a KC only tap beer that came out a couple weeks ago. It's a collaboration between Boulevard & Cambridge that has a mash-soured base beer with za'atar spices. I personally don't get much of the za'atar in there, but it's a really nice berliner weisse to boot.
Boulevard Collaboration #4 - The newest collaboration beer from Boulevard is with Ommegang (shocking!). It's a spiced saison that was brewed with sweet orange peel, lemon peel, coriander and grains of paradise, and then split for fermentation with Boulevard's farmhouse yeast and Ommegang's farmhouse yeast. The beer was then blended back to make the Collaboration.
Schlafly Tasmanian IPA - Schlafly's super popular TIPA, brewed with Galaxy hops, hit the shelves last Friday in KC.
Green Room Rye Bale - Not Green Room's first foray into barrel aging, but definitely their most alliterative. This one's a rye pale ale that was aged in aged in a Dark Horse Reunion Rye barrel.
Double Rye!! |
KC Bier Co SGH Hopfen Sack - Hopfen Sack is KC Bier Co's version of the Nutsack from Boulevard. Like Nutsack, they drain off the beer wort left soaked up in the hops (instead of the spices for Nutsack) from their Hopfen Doof and make a super IPA out of it. This year, they've gone one up and wet hopped the thing too with some hops grown by the brewer Karlton's friend, Sean Hill. The beer is going to be tapped at the brewery next Wednesday at 6p.
Happy hunting!