For a beer enthusiast like me, there's nothing better than a rip-roaring beer festival featuring lots of different beers to taste. The 2016 L.A. Beer Week Kickoff Festival, organized by the Los Angeles Brewers Guild and held at the L.A. Center Studios on June 18, certainly qualifies as that kind of “holy grail” for me – and after all, the grail in some references is a drinking vessel. Since I rode the rails in the form of the MTA's light-rail Expo line to get there, you can see how my title for this article came about.
The Neighborhood Brewery By Bruce L. Brode I've been a homebrewer for more than 30 years. In that time, I have seen a revolution in beer continuing in many areas and ways, most recently in the area of craft breweries opening in the Los Angeles area. There were previous efforts – in the mid-1980s I remember the City of Angels brewpub in Santa Monica in the space long since occupied by Border Grill, which was funded by those who had made some good bucks in the “go-go” days of the stock market of the early-to-mid 1980s employed at the defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert investment house.
Sunday, May 31, 2015 saw the latest annual convocation of our local mead enthusiasts at the Home Wine, Beer, Cheese and Meadmaking Shop. And madness it was! Enthusiasm was running high, as was the volume level as usual, yet we managed to “formally” taste 39 meads out of some 48 that were offered by the time it became necessary to wind things down at 4:30. As I said, enthusiasm was plentiful, and my biggest regret was that we were not able to sample all that was brought, despite moving the starting time up an hour to 12 noon this year. Even at that, folks were still 'meadifying' when I d
