Beer fests, figuratively speaking

Atlantic City's annual beer festival is less than a month off, and this past week, the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild announced the date for its annual June gathering aboard the USS New Jersey battleship museum at the Camden waterfront.

Beer festivals have become ubiquitous across New Jersey, one for almost every weekend of the year, it seems.

Chris Walsh from River Horse Brewing may have said it best when he joked awhile back, "They're happening on the half hour now."

But whatever the case, festivals are something of a numbers game, especially the behind-the-scene kind that support the attendance figures. (Yeah, yeah, the most important number is the net sum from ticket sales, plus whatever spinoff dollars that make their way into the local economies, i.e. site rental, parking, hired security and concessions.)

So while at the fifth annual Philly Craft Beer Festival on Saturday we asked its promoter, Andy Calimano of Starfish Junction Productions (that's Andy in the orange shirt in the photo at above left), to run through some of those figures.

Here are some numbers:

Beer – More than 5,425 gallons of kegged beer, plus cases of bottled and canned beer.

(Starfish's promotional literature notes 100 beers from 50 breweries, but those round numbers always seem to be the case.)

Plastic sampler cups: 6,000

Ice: 3.6 tons

Volunteers: More than 150.

Aggregator moment: A beer culture waning

The folks over at Slate feature a sobering look at the retreat of Germany's brewing industry.

It's hard times over there for the beverage that's virtually a country identity and gave the world the notion of beer purity, reinheitsgebot, an idea some have called one of the earliest consumer protections, but as Slate points out, the mandate for only hops, barley and water has had a sclerotic effect on Germany's brewing industry.

What's also interesting is the fact that Germany's youth eschew beer, seeing it as their fathers' Volkswagen, so to speak. Yet, here in the US, craft beer has become a beverage that many in their early 30s down to legal drinking age know before and better than their fathers' and grandfathers' Budweiser and Coors.

This is pretty cool ...

We like to think we're in good company on this one, as far as music for enjoying a beer goes ...

Richard Thompson is playing a Fillmore gig for attendees of the 2011 Craft Beer Conference in San Francisco toward the end of the month.

Folks familiar with this site may recognize the title Beer-Stained Letter as a play upon Richard's tune Tear-Stained Letter.

By the by, he's playing solo acoustic gigs in Newark (think Port 44 Brew Pub as your preshow watering hole) on the 18th and Princeton (think Triumph Brewing for a pint to get the night going) on the 21st.

Like we said, good company ...