Brewers band together to craft custom ale for beer festival

The Great Vegas Festival of Beer is scheduled to return for its third year Saturday, but this time it will be in the more sylvan setting of Sunset Park.

The park at 2601 E. Sunset Road will provide the festival with a more central location than Tivoli Village at 440 S. Rampart Blvd.

Organizers hope that bringing the event closer to the Strip may attract more out-of-town visitors.

“We do this for the love of good beer,” said Brian Chapin of Motley Brews, an organization that plans beer-related events in the valley.

The festival is the group’s biggest event every year. “We want to get people out to have a good time and taste some of the best beers available,” Chapin said.

He hopes to promote beer in all its variety to both connoisseurs and casual craft beer enthusiasts.

“I’m a big wine guy, too, but the differences between wines is subtle; but beer has a wide variety of flavors, and they can be so different,” Chapin said. “There’s a ton of difference in flavor between a pale ale and a stout, and you can’t even see through a stout. There are so many different recipes and ways to brew beer.”

More than 70 craft brewers are signed up for the event, including around a dozen from Southern Nevada.

While the local brewers are technically rivals, they are the friendliest of rivals. They often gather to compare notes and taste new brews together.

As part of the Nevada Brewers Guild, local brewers got together to create a signature brew for the event, Pyrite Pale Ale. The proceeds for sales of the signature ale will benefit the Nevada Brewers Guild. Boys & Girls Clubs of Las Vegas are also set to benefit from the event.

“It’s actually an extra pale ale or an IPA (India pale ale),” said Matt Marino, master brewer for the Joseph James Brewing Co. in Henderson. “We all got together at the Tenaya Creek Brewery (3130 N. Tenaya Way) and worked out the hops schedule and how we were going to make it. It’s the kind of beer we brew all the time, so we really had the best setup to brew it at the moment, so I got to do the actual hands-on brewing.”

It was a closely timed thing. The brewery was in heavy production to make up for downtime during a major remodel of operations. The Pyrite Pale Ale was the last batch of beer to go into fermenting tanks before workers began the remodel.

“It’s a one-off batch,” Marino said. “It’s going to be about 20 barrels, and a barrel is 31 gallons. It’s a weird measurement, but that’s what it is.”

The Pyrite Pale Ale won’t be bottled. It will be put into kegs, which are 15.5-gallon half-barrels. It will debut at the festival. Any ale remaining is to be sold at Nevada Brewers Guild member brewpubs across the valley.

In addition to the festival’s signature ale, more than 200 craft brews are expected to be available at the event.

Tickets are $30 in advance or $40 at the gate and include unlimited beer tasting from 3 to 7 p.m. Saturday. VIP brewers lounge tickets and early-
entry beer tasting tickets, which allow entry to the event at 2 p.m., are sold out.

A $20 designated driver ticket will allow festivalgoers to drink in the atmosphere and enjoy live music by Strung Out Sessions and the island roots band Kava Kreation without imbibing.

A wide variety of food is set to be available for purchase, including local favorites Sausage Fest and the Flying Monkey Asian fusion food truck.

For more information, visit greatvegasbeer.com.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.