Who Needs Birthday Cake When There’s Beer?

It’s American Craft Beer Week, and one good party deserves another, especially when the latter is truly relevant to the beer being made around Roanoke. While certainly well intended, ACBW can seem a little atmospheric – after all, at this point, do we really need an official reason to seek out and drink good beer? But a few of the breweries in the Roanoke area are celebrating anniversaries at the tail ends of this week, and that’s definitely a reason to take notice. At the least, it’s hard enough to start your own business much less keep it going, so such milestones are worth pointing out. In addition, at least one of those breweries which are having birthdays are also expanding in one way or another, (check out Chaos Mountain’s plans to add additional brewing equipment in a post a couple weeks ago) which means that for folks like you and me a greater variety of beer is likely to come our way. And that’s what keeps us interested these days. (Whether or not that’s a good thing is another discussion for another day, right?)

Nevertheless, birthdays are always a good time to grab a beer, so I figured I’d recognize those which are enjoying them at the moment.

Last weekend, Sunken City celebrated their second anniversary at their location in Hardy. The brewery has picked up the pace lately on offering some more limited run sorts of beers in bottles, including a Nachthexen, a Weizenbock (dark wheat ale) and Crooked Road, their (Imperial?) Cream Ale. These join Tartan Tent (Scottish ale) and John Henry’s Hammer, which might be a good starting place if you’re seeking out some of the brewery’s non “flagship” beers.

Both Chaos Mountain and Soaring Ridge celebrate their one year anniversaries this coming Saturday, May 16^th. There will be plenty of food at both, as Chaos Mountain will be having three food trucks on hand, while Soaring Ridge is hosting a pig pickin’ for their event. There will be live music throughout both events, and Chaos Mountain is featuring a $10 beverage deal that gets each ticket holder four 8oz pours (or two pints), with additional beer tickets available for purchase. Chaos Mountain’s Ultimate Warrior Imperial IPA, not often available anywhere other than the brewery, is a good place to start for some of this brewery’s non “flagship” beers.

Also of note: although it looks like Saturday’s Roanoke Craft Beer Tour is sold out, Friday night’s may still have some spots. So if you’d like to kick off the weekend while being shuttled to some of the area breweries, check them out at the link here.

Cheers to all the breweries!