We are now just over two weeks out from the 11th Los Angeles Beer Week. I do not expect you to attend something each night between June 15 – 23, but two key festivals bookend the week that you need to plan on attending.

Number one is the Kickoff Event. A whopping 71 L.A. County Brewers Guild members will be in attendance, plus 15+ more friends of the festival breweries. If you think about how many hours and miles you would need to drive to all of these breweries and compare that to one trip to Downtown L.A., that should be all the convincing you need.

What I like to use the event for is to help me figure out which breweries that I haven’t visited should go to the top of the list. Will it be the new Wave Maiden and their brand of herbal ales or Telco Brewing to the north or HighPoint Brewing Company in San Dimas?

You can also use the festival to sample the Unity 2019 IPA. This year, Claremont Craft Ales brewed the beer, a clean, crisp, and simple West Coast IPA.

On June 22, Cellador Ales invites some of their Sour Friends over to their North Hills taproom to feast on a variety of sour ales from top notch producers. The list of friends is 16 deep, but there are a few notable participants that you should not miss, including, of course Cellador. Beachwood Blendery, The Rare Barrel, Homage Brewing and Firestone Walker’s Barrelworks.

Cellador will have “a slew of vintage and exclusive pours” to put into the Sour Friends Fest exclusive glass. And then make sure to have some food to balance out all the acidity with one or both of the food trucks that will be on hand.

There will be a lot more LABW11 events to talk about to fill in the gaps between these two choices and that will be coming in the next Brew & You column.

The Non-IPA Beer of the Week is from Angel City Brewery and uses an ingredient that in the wrong hands would turn out too sickly sweet: strawberries. The DTLA brewery turns that flavor to its advantage by pairing it with the old German style Gose beer. The salt and wheat from that traditional recipe play well with the big berry flavor to create a fun and pink colored ever so slightly sour beer.

There are a lot of numbers to put on the schedule. Three, Four and Five to be exact. Homage Brewing is celebrating their 3rd Anniversary from May 29 – June 2 in Pomona, Mumford Brewing is turning 4 and has a party at their DTLA digs on Sunday, June 2. King Harbor Brewing hits the 5 year mark and has selected Saturday, June 1, to mark the occasion.

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