San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Move over, wine — Paso Robles is a beer town now
It’s no small honor to be asked to pour at the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival in Paso Robles. American craft breweries clamor to get on the exclusive summer lineup, establishing the Central Coast town known for its vineyards and varietals as a bona fide beer town.
This year, fewer than 60 breweries, including a few international ones, received an offer to come to the Firestone Invitational — which includes invitations to numerous side activities Firestone Walker Brewing Co. plans for them. Keeping the list short ensures not just that the weekend is manageable for event planners, but also that the bar for the quality of beer at the festival remains as high as possible.
“It’s a phenomenal event and it has risen in the industry to (become) one of the premier beer festivals in the country, without question,” says Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association. “That translates well to the consumer and in how fast it sells out. If you’re in the industry, you want to go, as a brewer or consumer. It’s at the top of everyone’s list.”
This year’s roster included California brews from Monkish and Sante Adairius, as well as national “whales” — a term for very rare beers — from Boston’s Trillium, Brooklyn’s Other Half, St. Louis’ Side Project and Indiana’s Three Floyds. Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo, founders of Russian River Brewing Co., busted out a magnum of their 2010 batch 5 of Temptation, a sour blond ale aged in Chardonnay barrels. Across the Paso Robles Event Center, Sweden’s Omnipollo and New Zealand’s Garage Project each poured beerslushie concoctions to hundreds.
Besides the quality of the beer on offer, the Firestone Invitational is different from other American beer festivals in one major way: It focuses as much on the experience of the visiting brewers as the experience of the attendees. Every year, Firestone Walker welcomes hundreds of national and international brewery founders and staffers for a weekend of water park fun, beer shares, wine tasting and communal dinners, all in addition to the Saturday festival itself. Firestone’s reasoning: If the brewers have a fun visit, they’ll keep coming back.
“It’s like if you focus on those brewers having a good time, the festival will just happen in a magical way,” Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson says. “This is almost like a brewers’ gathering, and sometimes a festival occurs.”
That kind of thinking has made the Firestone Invitational a massively popular event, not only with brewers but with many devout craft beer drinkers. Every year, nearly 3,500 tickets for the festival are snatched up in 15 minutes or less. By comparison, that’s roughly as many tickets as the much older Paso Robles Wine Festival sold this year.
The festival has become a force behind the city’s new economic and tourism initiative: Brew Paso. The campaign is a response to legislation the city passed in January 2018 to rezone portions of Paso Robles to allow for taprooms and tasting rooms to be built in bustling parts of downtown.
Brew Paso was created by the Chamber of Commerce to “seize the opportunity to market our city to prospective investors,” says Josh Cross, director of economic development for Paso Robles’ Chamber of Commerce. Its purpose is to attract those local beer and wine businesses, like Firestone Walker, to further invest in the city, but also to promote other nonwine Central Coast companies: distilleries, cideries, coffee roasters and craft soda makers.
The Firestone Invitational was the ideal vehicle for the launch of Brew Paso, Cross explains, because of how exemplary it is as a tourism revenue source.
“Vendors are traveling from all over the U.S. and world to spend three to five days in Paso,” Cross says. “This means that many are staying in hotels, dining in our restaurants, and spending money at our wineries and craft beverage businesses.”
For one such hotel, the budgetfriendly Adelaide Inn, Firestone Invitational weekend represents the biggest single Friday and Saturday nights of the year. The inn’s pool becomes a goto place for postfest crowds to share a growler from home while cooling off from the hot June Central Coast sun.
Brew Paso “will go a long way in moving Paso forward. We don’t want to be just known for our wine anymore,” says Adelaide Inn General Manager Bill Roof. “We did 20 years ago — it’s very promotable — but we’ve become a lot more than that.”
Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate producer. Email: apereira@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @alyspereira