The Los Angeles beer festival calendar starts with a bang as the second annual L.A. Beer & Food Festival returns to Mack Sennett Studios in Silver Lake on Saturday, January 27, 2018. This was a fun and more intimate festival than others with beer and food booths snaking through rooms and outdoors.

This year the L.A. County Brewers Guild event features 50 of L.A.’s independently-owned craft brewers pouring beers that you can then pair with food. It is a wonderful way to quickly and easily see and test how beers taste before, mid-bite, and after.

On the beer side of the equation, I am looking forward to two groups of breweries. One category involves breweries that I haven’t had a beer from yet, and the other features breweries in which I need to get re-acquainted. In the former category are Zymurgy Brew Works and Pocock Brewing and in the latter are Mt. Lowe Brewing and Five Threads Brewing. Since there are so many breweries to choose from, you had better come with at least a bit of a game plan. You can drink by style or by geography or just pick the beers that have the best hop-related puns.

This festival offers two admission levels. General costs $60 and nets you tasting glassware, beer, food, educational panels, and entertainment. Bump up to VIP to get all of those benefits plus an extra hour of early tasting. You can follow this LINK to purchase tickets.

This is an atypical beer festival in all of the right ways and I expect that L.A. Beer & Food Festival will grow leaps and bounds in its second year.

The first BEER OF THE WEEK for 2018 is Kool Kief, a collaborative IPA from the team of Eagle Rock Brewery and Chapman Crafted. In my opinion, these two breweries are underrated when it comes to IPAs and they are teaming up to tackle the two hottest button IPA trends of last year, Cryo pellets and hazy NE style.

Your HOMEWORK assignment is to add a garden implement to your next Bay Area beer itinerary. The Rake is the offshoot of Admiral Maltings, a boutique provider of malts to breweries. The taproom will feature beers made with grains that you will see through a window in their Alameda taproom. You can contrast this with a trip south to White Labs where yeast is the star. Now all we need is hops. Who am I kidding? We have plenty of those.

Find more of Sean Inman’s writing on his blog, Beer Search Party.