First, the good news: the Dark Side Brew Crew is in Denver for another round of the Great American Beer Festival! This is normally where one would follow that with some sort of bad news, but there isn’t any, at least not for us.

Once again, we are covering America’s largest craft beer festival out of the Colorado Convention Center, today (Thursday) through Saturday afternoon, including the Saturday morning awards ceremony.

Our day so far involved waking up way too early, then flying to Denver and taking the train into town. From there, we stopped at the hotel (it is kinda close, as the picture shows above), grabbed our credentials early, and then naturally began to pack on the massive amount of food we will need to get through this first night even semi-coherently. Huzzah to Denver Biscuit Company on South Broadway, and an equally big huzzah to the fact we could walk from there to our home away from home, TRVE Brewing.

With an Abysswalker IPA to get us going, here is just some of the stuff we have planned over the next four days:

• Live videos via Facebook and Instagram from the floor of GABF. We will be stopping by to talk to as many of our New Mexico breweries as we can find (they changed it this year; rather than grouping breweries geographically as in the past, they are now in alphabetical order). If you are not following us on social media, now is the time. Ignore politics and all that, just focus on the goodness of the craft beer, and even Twitter can still be fun.
• Franz Solo will provide daily written recaps here on the site. To avoid unintelligible gibberish, these will be posted the day after each session. Look for Saturday’s fairly early, as we have the awards ceremony at 10 a.m.
• Live awards ceremony coverage, including post-ceremonial interviews with what we hope to be many, many local brewers who are bringing home medals!
• Plus, whatever else we think of on the fly.

We realize it has become really hard, if not almost impossible, to get tickets to this event. We will do our best to take you inside so that you get to experience almost all of GABF from the comfort of your computer, tablet, or phone. If we could find a way to teleport samples of the many great beers to you, we would, but alas, that technology does not exist yet. Come on, scientists, get on that!

Got any questions? Any suggestions for things you would like to know about? Just message us here or on social media and we will do our best to provide that for you.

As always, just wish us luck surviving this epic sorts of madness, in the Halls of Valhalla, where the brave, may live, forever!

Cheers!

— Stoutmeister