Scenes from a Japantown Beer Walk

The Beer Walk series has quickly become my favorite beer festival.  No, it doesn't have all those hard to find beers, and no, you won't find a bunch of palate searing IPA's or strange concoctions that are essentially weird homebrewing experiments from professional brewers.  Instead, in a casual setting, you grab a glass, walk around a small downtown area and sample the beers from all the participating breweries at each participating store.  Most of the breweries are local and a many of the beers  poured can be found at your local grocery store, but I always find something interesting and new.  The fun is really exploring all the little shops and discovering what brewery is providing samples inside.   If I have one complaint from yesterday's Beer Walk, it's that Japantown's ukulele store was not one of the pouring stations.

I also find these Beer Walks to be great opportunities to chat with all the brewing reps at each location to find out a more about their breweries and upcoming releases.  I got to meet briefly with fellow South Bay blogger Brian Wimsett. It's a much more relaxed and varied setting than the usual chaos of a beer festival and both my wife and I have a blast each time we do a Beer Walk. Beer Walks are also great for can posing a beer glass in odd retail settings and to taking silly pictures.  So without further ado, here are the scenes from yesterday's Japantown Beer Walk in San Jose.

Scenes from a Mountain View Beer Walk

Yesterday's Mountain View Beer Walk is in the books.  For those who don't know what a "Beer Walk" is, it involves getting a taster glass and walking around a downtown to different stores and sampling beer from different breweries at each stop.   Part of the fun is discovering what beer is pouring at each store and its fun to stand around sipping beer in a place like a bookstore, boutique or hair salon.

The Mountain View Beer Walk was a 25th Anniversary Celebration of Mountain View's Tied House Brewpub of sorts.  It also served as an introduction to the general public of Santa Clara Valley Brewing initial release of Electric Tower IPA.  Of course, plenty of other great breweries like Strike, Hermitage, New Belgium, Goose Island, Santa Cruz Ale Works, Fault Line, Anchor, Heretic, Almanac, Lagunitas, Firestone-Walker, Gordon-Biersch, Ninkasi, Hanger 24, Speakeasy, and Sierra Nevada participated.

Another great job by The Beer Walk folks.  All the Beer Walk staff in their bright orange shirts were all friendly and helpful and the event was well organized.  I'll leave you with a few pictures of yesterday's event.