A General Admission ticket gets you in the door at 3pm and access to 8 – 3 oz. beer samplings (with the ability to purchase more beer tickets at the event.) The VIP ticket gets you in the door an hour earlier and gives you access to the VIP area with specialty and seasonal beers, as well as free appetizers. They even gave us a promo code which extends the early bird ticket prices for a few more weeks.

General Admission: $35 (use code GUIDE for $5 off)
VIP Tickets: $60 (used code GUIDE for $5 off)
Beer Me Pack: which is 4 General Admission tickets for $100 (just $25 per ticket)

Ticket Link

Ticket Giveaway:

BrewFest has given us 2 General Admission tickets to give away to our readers. Between now and April 29th, follow us on Instagram (@houstonbeer) and include both our username and #BrewFestHOU in the caption of your photos. We’ll pick our favorite photo and announce the winner on our Instagram on Monday, May 1st.

There’s no limit to the number of entries, just make sure they meet the criteria!

The recap video they made from last year’s event should give you a great idea of what to expect: beer, games, food, and fun.

Beer & Brewery List:

We’ll keep the list updated as breweries announce what they will be bringing.

• 512 Brewing Company
• 11 Below Brewing
• Adelbert’s Brewery
• Alamo Beer Company
• Alaskan BrewingCompany
• Arrogant Brewing
• Austin Eastciders
  • Blood Orange
  • Original
  • Pineapple
• B-52 BrewingCompany
• Blue Moon
• Ballast Point Brewing & Spirits
  • Sculpin
  • Grapefruit Sculpin
  • Bonito Blonde
  • Sour Wench
  • Victory at Sea Variant
• Brash Brewing Company
• Buffalo Bayou Brewing Company
• Cedar Creek Brewery
• Community Beer Company
• Deep Ellum Brewing Company
• Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales
• Founders Brewing Company
• Goliad Brewing Company
• Green Flash
• Guinness
  • Guinness Draught
  • Guinness Blonde Americal Lager
  • Guinness Irish Wheat
• Holler Brewing Company
  • Holler IPA
• Hops & Grain
  • A Pale Mosaic
  • The One They Call Zoe
  • Greenhouse IPA
  • Dispensary IPA
• Independence Brewing Company
  • Stash IPA
  • Illustrated Man
  • Power & Light
  • Liberty Lunch
  • RedBud Berliner Weisse
• Lagunitas Brewing Company
• Left Hand Brewing Company
• Leinenkeugel’s
• Locust Cider
  • Dark Cherry Hard Cider
  • Sweet Aged Apple Hard Cider
  • Hootenanny Vanilla Hard Cider
• Odell Brewing Company
• Revolver Brewing
• Sierra Nevada
  • Pale Ale
  • Sidecar Pale Ale
  • Tropical Torpedo IPA
• St. Killian Importing
• Stone Brewing Company
• Sweetwater Brewing Company
  • 420
  • Blue
  • Grass Monkey
• Under the Radar Brewery
• Unibroue
• Victory Brewing Company
• Whole Foods Market Brewing Company

The post A Preview of Houston Press BrewFest [Plus a Ticket Giveaway!] first appeared on Houston Beer Guide.

The post A Preview of Houston Press BrewFest [Plus a Ticket Giveaway!] appeared first on Houston Beer Guide.

Held under the pavilion at Hennessy Park next to Saint Arnold Brewing Company, the small venue was a perfect setting for this bite-sized festival. The 10.79-gallon firkins used for the event allowed brewers to offer a small batch for experimentation to add adjuncts to, creating concoctions with fruit, spices, chocolate, coffee and other special ingredients. Fifteen Texan breweries brought firkins full of beer featuring everything from peanut butter to peppers.

Freetail’s Double Cherry Bexarliner was a hit. Though I prefer their more refreshing peach version, the tart Michigan Montmorency cherries in the latest of their Berliner Weisse fruit series paired well with the lactic tang of the beer. An improvement over the too-restrained single Cherry Bexarliner, which was served on the festival’s specialty tap wall, the extra cherry punch of the Double was just what the Berliner needed. Also fruity and refreshing was the addition of grapefruit to Real Ale’s White, a dry-hopped Belgian wit. Crisp with a subtle grapefruit finish, it hit the spot at the hottest time of day on the summer afternoon.

The popular variant vanilla earned high marks in its starring roles in New Republic’s Vanilla Sky, based on their Skylight dunkelweizen, and Lone Pint’s vanilla and chicory variation of their standby brown ale, Gentleman’s Relish. Though a bit overpowering in the dunkelweizen, the vanilla was a natural complement to the typical banana flavor of the hefeweizen yeast, and it tamed the boldness of the chicory in the brown ale.

No Label brought two cocktail-inspired beers: Old Fashion Ridgeback Ale and Dark & Stormy 1^st Street Blonde. The Old Fashion was the more successful of the two. Bourbon cherries, bitters and orange peel added complexity to the dark amber brew and nicely accented its existing caramel notes and roasted malt. The rum-soaked ginger and lime enlivened the blonde, but the lime finish was too intense.

Arguably the most audacious experiment, Cycler’s Ryed Hard (Reubenized) was the brewery’s take on a Reuben sandwich. Their rye ale was made over with mustard seed, star anise, juniper berries, dill seed, bay leaves, ginger, cloves, cardamom, allspice, coriander and mace to taste like a Reuben without the corned beef: an odd beer, but it worked well.

Like any experiment, the results can vary. Sometimes the result is something you want to replicate, and sometimes it falls flat. In my opinion, Deep Ellum’s Very Berry Dallas Blonde, 8^th Wonder’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Rocket Fuel, and Real Ale’s modified Real Heavy Scotch ale were misses. The Very Berry Blonde tasted like a watered-down berry lemonade, the Peanut Butter Chocolate Rocket Fuel was thin and had hardly any discernible peanut butter flavor, and the Real Heavy with English tea tips, candied figs and dried apricot had too many flavors to focus on.

A late entry in the Fest, new kid on the block Eureka Heights really impressed me with My Stoutrifice, an incredibly well-balanced milk stout brewed with Mexican cinnamon and peppers. It’s one of the best pepper beers I’ve ever had.

Other highlights included (512) Café au Lait, their venerable Pecan Porter with a coffee kick; the sarsaparilla-spiked Brazos Valley NYF Silt Brown, a dead-ringer for its namesake, Not Your Father’s Root Beer; Deep Ellum Tongue Punch, a solid tropical twist on their standard IPA; and the luscious, creamy Nutella®-like evolution of Southern Star’s Buried Hatchet Stout, Deez Hazelnutz.

Those standouts were a warm-up for my vote for Best in Show: Karbach Bourbon Barrel Hellfighter Horchata. The welcoming, warm cinnamon nose invited me to drink the imperial porter. Bourbon upfront with a grainy backbone and a cinnamon finish, it was a perfect symphony of flavors and one of my favorite BBHs to date. I really hope Karbach releases this one, at least in limited batches, so more people can try it.

Though most of the beers at the Fest were variation of standards from their regular beer lines, some breweries brought unaltered brews, showing off the richer, smoother character of cask-conditioned beers. Karbach offered their lupulin bomb, Hop Delusion Double IPA; Southern Star’s newish IPA, Conspiracy Theory, made an appearance; the revered Saint Arnold Divine Reserve 15 Russian Imperial Stout came out of retirement for the occasion, and 8^th Wonder’s tasty limited-release gose, Haterade, was also featured at the Fest.

One of my favorite aspects of this festival was the signage. Too often at festivals you are left on your own to figure out what you are actually drinking. Firkin Fest featured signs labeling the style, ABV, IBU and a detailed description of each beer and its transformation from its normal base into its firkin alter ego. Even better, some of the brewers were on hand to ask questions about their beers. The intimacy of the event allowed for longer discussions with the brewers, which I very much enjoyed. I’ll be back next year.

The post Houston Firkin Fest 2016: A Firkin Good Time first appeared on Houston Beer Guide.

The post Houston Firkin Fest 2016: A Firkin Good Time appeared first on Houston Beer Guide.

Untapped Houston is this Saturday at Discovery Green, and you’re obviously going. You’re not? Oh. Well, you really should. It’s Houston’s best annual craft beer festival by far, and also doubles as a pretty cool music fest too. Plus, the weather is supposed to be awesome. So, yeah. You should buy tickets. Go. I’ll wait.

OK, now we can talk about the beer. It’s a huge list, both awesome and overwhelming at once. It’s one of those classic #beernerdproblems — you want to drink all the beers (and tick all the ticks) but you don’t even know where to start. That’s where this post comes in. I’ve been to a beer fest or four, and since I’m a nerd about these things, I never go in without a gameplan (and/or a spreadsheet). After a few hours of staring at the list, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to drink. Maybe more importantly, I also know what I’m going to drink first.

–Jester King

A pretty obvious first stop, and a repeat from last year’s first stop and first beer: 分 桃, aka Fen Tao, their peach sour. In addition to having an awesome label/name/story, it’s delicious. I’m pretty confident that this will be the first keg to blow on Saturday, so it’s a no-brainer. Don’t ignore La Vie en Rose while you’re here: this farmhouse ale refermented with “leftover” Atrial Rubicite raspberries is nowhere near as famous as AR (it also looks and tastes almost nothing like it), but it’s a great beer on its own.

–Freetail

I remain bitter about the biggest tease in recent Texas craft beer history (RIP, Freetail Houston), but Freetail still rocks. I’m most excited about trying their Peach Berlinercus, a blend of Yo Soy Un Berliner (their summer seasonal Berliner Weisse) and Peche’cus (their rye wit aged in wine barrels with peaches). They’re also bringing Rye Wit (what it says on the tin) and Oktobefiesta (an Oktoberfest with a twist in the form of Belgian yeast).

–Karbach

These guys seem to be flexing their creative muscles a bit more lately, with the most exciting project (to me, anyway) being the recently announced Fieldworks series. Three of the six Karbach beers available at Untapped will be “new to me”: Bourbon Barrel Hellfighter with Vanilla, Belgian Tripel, and Belgian Pale Ale. If you haven’t tried it yet, the Fieldworks Brett IPA is definitely worth a shot, too.

–Firestone Walker

Few U.S. breweries can match these guys when it comes to the diversity of their exceptional portfolio — they make kickass “regular” beers (two of which, Pivo Pils and Union Jack IPA, will be at the fest), and they’re at the head of the class when it comes to barrel-aged monsters. They’re only bringing one of the latter to Untapped, but it’s a doozy: Helldorado, a blonde barleywine that they just released for the very first time. I missed out on a bottle, but there’s no way I’m missing it on Saturday.

–Live Oak

A huge key to surviving a long day at a beer festival is making sure many of your pours are low in alcohol. There’s no better place to do this than at the Live Oak stand. Their Hefeweizen (5.2%) is world class and on the short list of “best beers in Texas” regardless of style. They’re also bringing two rarer beers that I’m excited to try for the first time: the 3.0% abv Grodziskie (a top-fermented, smoked, hoppy, all-wheat Polish style that was nearly extinct), and the 4.4% Helles Rauchlager (a pale, smoky and bitter lager brewed using a decoction mash).

You’ll note that I’ve only suggested 15 of the 250 or 300 beers that will be available on Saturday. That’s no knock on many of the breweries/beers that went unmentioned. There’s going to be a TON of good stuff out there. Just to name a couple more:

-Saint Arnold is bringing their delicious new Art Car IPA and their eminently crushable (and also delicious) Boiler Room Berliner Weisse. They’re also serving some Divine Reserve and Bishop’s Barrel big guns at scheduled times. Expect lines for those.

-8th Wonder and Buffalo Bayou are each bringing staples (Rocket Fuel and Hopston; 1836 and More Cowbell), rarities (Mission Control and AstroTurf; Peppermint Gingerbread Stout and Whiskey’d Smoke on the Bayou), and Cream Ales (Dome Faux’m and Sam’s Daily).

-Brash has released four Houston-brewed beers (all of which are really good), and three will be at Untapped: Cortado Imperial Coffee Stout, Cali Green IPA, and Pussy Wagon Imperial IPA.

Hell, that’s just some of the Houston stuff. There’s so much more. KBS! Red Bud! Commissar! BA Narwhal! BA Bigfoot! The Calling! Saison-Brett! Yellow Rose! Sorachi Ace! Abyss! Burton Baton! 120! Zoe! La Folie! Cali Belgique! Golden Monkey! Outer Darkness!

You get the point. If you made it this far and you’re still not going, you confuse me. But I’m not giving up on you. Go get those tickets. See y’all on Saturday.

The post My first 5 stops at Untapped Houston first appeared on Houston Beer Guide.

The post My first 5 stops at Untapped Houston appeared first on Houston Beer Guide.