Tickets Still Available For Pride Of Brooklyn, Bringing The Best Of Homebrew To Gowanus' Littlefield This Saturday

On Saturday, April 16, the Pride of Brooklyn Homebrew Festival will be taking over performance venue Littlefield in the borough's Gowanus neighborhood, with 30 homebrewers handing out samples of their finest creations. Tickets are still on sale for $30, and are going fast.

This annual festival has been going strong for several years, and has seen the home-brewing scene in Brooklyn grow up around it. Many Brooklynites are brewing their own beer, and if you've ever been to a homebrew festival, you'll know that it's unlike any other beer experience out there.

As opposed to other beer festivals, where big brands are usually represented by volunteers or regional managers, at homebrew festivals the beers are poured by the amateur brewers who single-handedly brewed the beer themselves, and these festivals are the only places on Earth where the beer can be sampled. While quality can vary, homebrewers are becoming increasingly savvy and skilled these days, and are brewing increasingly complex and hard-to-find beer styles.

"It's interesting that the homebrew culture is so strong in New York, since everyone has such limited space in their apartments," award-winning homebrewer Alex Biedermann, who will be pouring  an "American Wild Ale," (a blend of three blonde ales with mixed/wild fermentation) at the event, told us. "That said, the hobby embodies the DIY spirit, and working to install a brewing system under those constraints plays into that as well. Or maybe it's just a good outlet for seasonal depression to brew beer all winter."

If you're looking for an opportunity to drink beer that you can't find anywhere else, poured by the person who did the brewing, don't miss Pride of Brooklyn.