DRAFT Magazine

By Noah Davis

SF Beer Week kicks off its second annual festival on February 5th. In preparation for the glorious 10-day experience, we caught up with beer writer Jay Brooks who helped found the event last year. He talks to us about his favorite events, using social media to recruit the masses, and why too much choices is a good thing indeed.

What’s your role in SF Beer Week?

I’m one of the founders. It stemmed out of two different ideas. I used to be the GM of the Celebrator beer magazine and we had an event that we ran for six or seven years called Beerapalooza. We had a few events that took place over the same week. Then, some of the folks in San Francisco — most notably Shaun O’Sullivan and Dave McLean — who have strong beer months during the month of February had also looked at events like Philly Beer Week and thought that the format might work well in San Francisco. There were six of us initially last year and reconfigured Beerapalooza as SF Beer Week and made it a new event and made it what it is now.

How much work is it? Is it ever overwhelming?

It’s pretty overwhelming. [Laughs] I think last year, it succeed in spite of ourselves. We paid for all of it ourselves, each of the people who founded it. We didn’t have sponsors the way we do this year. It was hard work.

This year, there are a lot of people working hard still, but because we’ve had some sponsorship money, we’ve been able to develop the Web site in a better way, more streamlined. We were able to have a small paid staff that was responsible for taking care of those things and not just have people try to fit it in wherever they could around their other job. That’s made a big difference I think we’re a little more prepared this year than we were last year.

What’s different this year?

The biggest one is probably that last year, there were a lot of people and breweries who didn’t quite get what we were trying to do ahead of time at least. Now that they saw how successful the first SF Beer Week was, we have a lot more people coming to us and saying, “Hey, I want to be a part of this.” They saw how it went, that it did bring people into the city, and that everyone who put on events had good attendance. Everything worked out kind of the way we expected, which was that you throw a lot of great events and people are helpless not to come.

You have a pretty comprehensive Web presence with a Twitter feed, an iPhone app, and a fun Web site. Can you talk a little bit about the social media aspects of planning Beer Week?

That’s a product of really looking at the importance of social media to events and really bringing in people who are really good at it. Gannett SF is the company we turned to. That’s something we couldn’t afford last year, but this year we could and it was important to have that eye-catching site. I mean hell, we’re in Silicon Valley. If our Web site didn’t look good, we’re doing something wrong.

Are you noticing the social media efforts helping to reach new people?

It’s hard to tell. There certainly are new venues and people who are putting on events that are different from last year. We’re certainly seeing involvement from groups who weren’t involved last year, who took more of a wait and see approach. So yeah, but it’s hard to tell who’s going to attend and whether that’s going to change and grow. We certainly hope so. We’ll see.

You have roughly 20 events per day. How do you suggest people choose what to attend?

I think there are two ways that people can look at that. One is what’s close to them. For people who are in the South Bay, maybe it makes sense to look at what’s there. The second way is what’s most exciting to you. It’s hard to choose. That’s our No. 1 complaint, and that’s a complaint we like to hear: “There’s too much. I can’t decide!” I think that’s great.

The fact that there are overlapping events that lots and lots of people would want to go to speaks well of what we’ve tried to do with our beer week. This is certainly not to pour alcohol on other beer weeks, but something we set out to do was to not have the “Pint Night” sort of events. We didn’t want to have happy hour type of events, but to have all the events that are going on showcase beer in a really good light. There has to be something to it. We have less events than some of the other beer weeks but we think that the quality of all the events really is our goal, and for that I think we are succeeding.

Any events you’re specifically looking forward to?

Lots of things. One of the most fun events I went to last year was a cheese and beer event at the Bistro in Hayward. The cheese event was very different from any one that I’ve ever been to. What they did was they got five different cheeses and five different breweries, and they asked brewery to pick one of their beers to pair with each of the cheeses. Everybody got a lump of cheese and then five small pourings of a beer from each brewery. Basically, you sat down with one cheese and five beers and tried that cheese with each of the five beers trying to decide which one paired best. They tallied that up and at the end — I don’t think there were any losers, but they said which one most people seemed to think worked best with the cheese.

Usually when you do a cheese and beer pairing, it’s one cheese and one beer. This was a way to make it much more fun and educational in so far as you tried a range of beers with the same cheese and you saw what worked and what didn’t work in a much more real-time sort of way that I hadn’t seen before. I’m looking forward to that again.

When you wake up on the morning or the afternoon of February 15th, how will you know SF Beer Week has been a success?

I think it’s the passion of all the people in the Bay Area. Every community has it’s own vibe for its beer scene, and ours is one of people who are really passionate about what they are doing. You see the same people event after event, and we’re all here for the same reasons: It’s fun, it’s enjoyable, it enriches our lives.

– Noah Davis is editor of DRAFTMag.com.