I dare you to click the link above and find out about all the beery goodness that will be going on across the nation next week! I double-dog dare you!

Now that you’re done with that, notice that unless you live in middle Tennessee, you can’t really enjoy one of the couple of events that are going on in the fine state in which I live.  Looking at Virginia, I would have to travel several hours.  Even looking at “Beer City USA” Asheville, NC, which is a little over an hour away, there are only a couple “official” activities that are listed. I expected more out of Asheville, but that is another conversation. What I expect out of my area is at least a little more than nothing. We have 2 local breweries, neither of which with facilities to serve their own beer past growlers, but we have them available.  We have nearly 20 restaurants (I counted) that claim to have more craft beer than most establishments.  The distributors in our area are getting more of the beers we want….so where’s the fail?

The local economy has caused at least one place I know of that might have events based around this week to close down, at least temporarily.  When it comes to things of this nature, our area seems to only really want to visit a place that would cater to our craft beer sensibilities after they have closed due to lack of patronage.  It’s frustrating…really.

So where is the silver lining?

1. Personally, I will try to get to places I don’t normally go next week for a craft beer. It only takes 1 beer to celebrate, so I invite my friends locally to celebrate with me.
2. I will share my homebrew with people next week. Hopefully, I will get a chance to share with people who normally drink the big brewers, but if not, I will at least enjoy my own brew in my own home.
3. I will visit one of the local breweries and fill a growler with their beer. The cost isn’t much and the enjoyment is almost always more than the price.
4. I will launch CraftBeerTricities.com this month.  It will be rough to start with and is really a grass roots effort to increase knowledge and cooperation between patrons, restaurants, stores and distributors.  The gameplan is falling into place and I look forward to getting it rolling. Any help would be appreciated.
5. I will work over the next year to create relationships with local business owners in order to create events, no matter how small, to celebrate this observance.

This is my manifesto.  I will work to make this area a cool place to grab a drink and break away from the typical top 5 pilseners on tap.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 8:36 am and is filed under beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.