MNN - Mother Nature Network

Philly Beer Week runs from June 3-12, and a quick look at the participating breweries shows that 26 of the 32 breweries are from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland or New York. The focus is definitely on the beers of the region.

 

At Philly Beer Week, beer lovers can discover new beers from local breweries. If they discover beers they love, they’ll be likely to continue to support those breweries long after beer week. CraftBeer.com has a list of reasons why supporting local breweries is important, including reducing your beer’s carbon footprint.

 

Choosing the events that will introduce those new beers can be overwhelming, though. Philly Beer Week is not one event held at one venue over the course of a week. It’s 1,000 large and small events held at almost 200 venues all over the city and its suburbs (including South Jersey) for 10 days. The events feature and celebrate local and craft beers, the beer makers that create them, and the beer lovers who drink them. With so many events happening simultaneously, it would be easy to miss sampling a local beer you’ve been interested in trying, but an app for both the iPhone and Android helps solve that problem.

 

The app has all of the events in both list and map format, and it also has a list of participating breweries and the events where they will participate. You can save events you’re interested to a personal “saved events” list, so if you do a little planning, you’ll have easy access to all the information you'll need.

 

I’ve been slowly educating myself about beer, and I’m particularly interested in finding locally brewed beer that I enjoy. Philly Beer Week is a great opportunity to do this, but the sheer number of events is overwhelming. I downloaded the iPhone app, and it has taken away the enormity of it all and allowed me focus in on the events, breweries and venues that I can get to.

 

If you’re in the Philadelphia region, go ahead and download the free app and see what might interest you.