Each year, breweries, venues and event hosts of all types from across the Bay Area celebrate independent craft beer and its role within our communities of fostering friendships, encouraging collaboration, and as a source of creativity and self-expression. They do this in the form of a curated “week” (actually 10 days) of amazing, inspiring events and activities.
This year the local beer community will host these events from Friday, February 7 through Sunday, February 16. If you’re a lover of local craft beers and socializing, there’s surely an event for you. SF Beer Week’s events—and there will be hundreds of them—cater to many tastes. The craft community is a big one and craft beer appeals to a wide range of people. SF Beer Week events are diverse, and collaboration is encouraged across kindred industries that are as inventive and as committed to creativity as craft beer itself: the arts, entertainment, food, tech, humanities, and more.
The SF Beer Week Opening Gala, from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday, February 7 at Pier 25 is the largest, most anticipated, and prestigious annual gathering of the Northern California craft beer community. It also serves as the kickoff party for SF Beer Week, commencing the 10-day marathon of beer dinners, tastings, tap takeovers and educational events that occur all over the Bay Area. This community-centric gathering is ground zero for the region’s craft beer scene. Breweries from throughout the greater Bay Area will be converging in San Francisco to serve the most creative and compelling beers the region has to offer.
Attendees receive a commemorative glass and enjoy unlimited samples of new, rare and classic beers. Expect mouth-puckering sours alongside subtle funk, hop bombs both cloudy and clear, brawny barrel-aged brews, and a wide range of beer styles traditional and experimental with all the creativity and innovation that has made Northern California one of the best beer producing regions in the world. Over 120 breweries will tap more than 300 select beers at this event and, in addition to great beer, some of the best local food vendors in the Bay Area will be on site, serving up delicious options for purchase.
Five never-before-tasted Bay Area Brewers Guild official collaboration beers will be tapped for the first time at the opening gala this year. These Bay Area Brewers Guild one-off collaboration brews are an annual hallmark of SF Beer Week, expressing the brewers’ collective state of mind, and honoring the cooperative and creative spirit of the craft beer community. All five recipes sourced some or all of their grain from freshly kilned California-grown malts from Admiral Maltings in Alameda, one of the nation’s few traditional artisan floor-malting facilities. The 2020 official SF Beer Week collaborations will offer an exhibition of the bright, hoppy, drinkable beers brewers love to make.
Tickets for the gala are $80 for general admission or $120 for a limited amount of VIP Passes that allow you early access to the event.
But the opening gala is just one of hundreds of events that will take place. With so many events, planning is key. The SF Beer Week website at sfbeerweek. org offers a few tools to make that easier, including the ability for you to create and share your own itinerary, to filter and sort by a host of criteria (event type, event time, geography, participants, etc.), and to look up what’s happening at your favorite venues.
The cost to attend other events, if any, is determined by the host venue or event producer. Many events are “pay as you go,” meaning free to attend, but you pay for any beer and/or food you consume. Other events may require an admission fee, or advanced reservations, or ticket purchase. Still other events may offer free food samples or discounts.
