About Baltimore Beer Week

What is Baltimore Beer Week?

Baltimore Beer Week is a collaborative effort of businesses and beer enthusiasts in our community to highlight awareness and quality of all things beer in the Chesapeake region. Focusing on beer culture, culinary aspects, fun events and even beer history, we seek to increase people’s awareness of craft beer in the Baltimore region.

Celebrating Baltimore’s Unique Beer Culture in the Land of Pleasant Living

The 4th annual Baltimore Beer Week will be taking place October 19th – 28th, 2012. The full 10 days of the event will play host to well over 300+ total events at nearly 70 or more venues from all over the region including Laurel, Bel Air, Hagerstown, Millersville, Columbia, Ellicott City and of course the rest of the immediate Baltimore metro area. With this kind of excitement going on the Baltimore region has every right to be proud of its brewing heritage and the plethora of exciting beer bars, restaurants and beer-based emporiums who will be hosting this smorgasbord of beery events.

The Star Spangled Banger was crafted by wood expert John Gasparine into a one of a kind hand-crafted mallet and actually uses wood from Maryland’s famous fallen Wye Oak tree.

BBW’s media partner, The City Paper, plans to highlight all of the events in their special BBW insert and the Official BBW guide will be available at all Sponsor/venues throughout the week, and as always, you can get the latest info at www.BaltimoreBeerWeek.com .You can also join the ever-growing email list and get Tweets and Facebook updates as well. Ah, Baltimore Beer Week – what a wonderful celebration of “All things beer in the land of pleasant living”.

How Baltimore Beer Week Began…

Joe Gold the founder of Baltimore Beer Week had been silently watching the beer landscape of Charm City evolve over the years as it suffered key closures of cherished beer establishments, lost brands – some of which were gold medal winners at the GABF and the perceived apathy from the general populous to this shift was too much to bear. He wanted to do something about it – but what was the platform?

His first thoughts were to organize a Baltimore Beer Club of sorts – that could meet monthly and support and promote the Baltimore Beer scene… After speaking to a few close beer aficionado friends (who loved the idea – but were put off by the amount of organization and coordination it would take) Gold decided that wasn’t the angle he thought would make the impact he was looking for.

Along came Philly Beer Week in the fall of 2008 and the idea of organizing one entire week to the pursuit of raising awareness for “all things beer” in Baltimore suddenly had some merit.

Gold then met with the organizers of both Philly Beer Week and New York Craft Beer Week to discuss their structure and challenges. In November 2008 Gold convened a small group of individuals at Max’s Taphouse to discuss the possible organization of a beer week in Baltimore. In attendance at that critical first meeting along with Gold were Baltimore beer scene heavy weights Hugh Sisson, Volker Stewart, Casey Hard, Rob Kasper, Dominic Cantalupo, Jim McGinty, Gene Myers and Alexander D. Mitchell IV.

From that first brainstorming meeting the 2009 BBW Organizing Committee was formed. The very first organizing committee meeting was held in January 2009 and Baltimore Beer Week was born…

A colorful version of a portion of the above story was published on B the site in 2011, check it out.

For interviews or media information, contact either:

• Joe Gold, joegold@ccbeer.com - 410-960-6598 (cell)
• Dominic Cantalupo, dominiccantalupo@championrealty.com - 410-963-5466 (cell)