These photos were taken at the 4th Annual Alpine Kraft Bierfest which was held at the Alpine Inn Restaurant at Alpine Village in Torrance. The craft beer event featured beers from all over the United States with a couple very rare Belgian brews added for good measure. While I did not take the time to count each of the breweries represented or the number of various beers available for sampling, they advertised over 40 breweries and 100 beers. I know there were a couple other craft beer events going on in Southern California this past weekend, but if you drove away from the South Bay instead of towards it, you may have messed up.

The Kraft Bierfest was held over the course of two sessions, beginning Friday evening and concluding with an afternoon session on Saturday afternoon. This was the second time they have split the event up over two sessions. Last year, to avoid the possibility of the best brews running out during the first session, Alpine’s event coordinators decided to split up the beers by day and put up a schedule of appearance for the brews so people could choose which day would have the most beers that they wanted to try. This time they made every brew available on both days but cut off serving brews that were limited on Friday so some would be available on Saturday. While there were people that were not too happy when the Agrestic or Winter Harvest ran out on Friday, the people that showed up on Saturday were quite grateful.

While I do not have the final numbers, it seemed like there may have been people in attendance on Friday night than Saturday afternoon; I doubt if either session had more than a couple hundred people in attendance. The only line I recall seeing that had more than four people in it were the first few people that arrived Saturday and headed straight for the Agrestic. I would not be surprised to see this event go back to being a one session deal.

While I am not really sure why the attendance levels were down, I can assure you the craft beer levels were off the charts. Examples of some of the fine brews available include Bootlegger’s 7th Anniversary Day & Night, Deschute’s Black Butte XXVII and 2014 Abyss, Allagash Odyssey, Fluxus and James Bean, Epic Brewing’s Elder Brett Saison, Stone’s Winter Harvest 2014 as well as Rodenbach Foederbier and Caractère Rouge. There were gallons of barrel-aged winter brews and lots of sours to clean your palate in between.

In talking with various attendees I got the impression that there were very few complaints and everyone seemed to have a great time. I know I sure did and I really enjoyed meeting those of you that came up to introduce yourselves. There are a lot of photos so if you came on Saturday, those photos begin on page 12. Cheers!