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.