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Let's eat.

From Big Sur's killer cliff-clinging eateries to Salinas' unparalleled produce, this blog aims to sniff out all things Monterey County can stomach, via picture and prose, curiosity and appetite, hand and mouth.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Better Than Beer



It just ain't easy to improve on an afternoon soaked with hundreds of craft beers and AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tom Petty tribute bands. (Firestone and "Free Bird"? Coastal Fog and "Freefallin'"? That's entertainment.) The Monterey Beer Festival (373-2843) is such a sacred event, in fact, that one couple chose it as the time and place to celebrate their holy matrimony, getting married on the very fairgrounds grass a year ago.

But event playcaller Jeff Moses has isolated several such improvement opportunities. MBF 2010's June 5 fest ($35) will still pour scores of brews from more than 70 breweries, but it will also include Thursday and Friday warm-ups and a film festival he's calling Short Pour Film Fest looping throughout the 12:30-5pm affair. Thursday is a concert with Bria Skonberg and Band at Forest Theatre in Carmel; Friday's a celebration at Culinary Center of Monterey
with Mary Pagan food and a preview of some of the tastes to come; the snippets will be all about beer. Two teasers are imbedded here from some webcasting beer freaks known as The Happy Hour Guys and the so-called Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project.



Any beer-in-media content is fair game—Moses says he's wrapping up a bunch of 3-4 minute short films, beer podcasts, beer TV shows, Old Pabst commercials, a minimovie on a San Francisco Beer Week pub crawl, and a segment of the documentary Beer Wars.

"It'll be an interesting thing to watch," he says. "On the flow, sit down, take a break." Then get back to drinking beer in the sun. Two words: I do.