The year in West Virginia Beer • Part Two

Part Two continues our look back over the year in West Virginia beer. Festivals, promotions, and breweries-in-planning all made their mark in 2016. Here are some highlights.

Beer festivals mature and proliferate

Some established  festivals grew larger. Some new ones took off. Our oldest called it quits. Overall, it was a busy year for festivals.

Huntington’s Rails & Ales Festival grew even larger, got more better, and maintained its lock on the title of WV’s best craft beer festival. Charleston’s Foam at the Dome Festival had an incredibly successful debut year. Brew Skies, the state premier live music and WV beer event, recorded its most successful year. Charleston’s Appalachian Power baseball park held its best craft beer event to date. Wheeling’s Mountaineer BrewFest again proved its value to the community.

Bridgeport held its inaugural Sound Waves and IPAs festival. Charles Town impressed with its Happy Retreat Craft Beer and Music Festival. The Charleston region again created excitement with the Kegs 4 K9s, OktoberWest, and Hops & Heat craft beer events. Morgantown had a great Home Run & Hops event at the Black Bears ballpark. Morgantown Brewing hosted another of its popular Oktoberfests. Snowshoe Resort also continued its successful long-running series of craft beer events. Everywhere you looked, enthusiasm was growing for craft beer.

The organizers of Bramwell, the state’s longest running beer festival, decided to retire the event following 20 glorious years of providing the one of the most unique and cool beer festivals you’d find anywhere. Picking up the slack, folks in both Bluefield and Pipestem hosted new festivals on the former Bramwell weekend.

Non-beer events add beer

A bunch of non-beer events around the state added craft beer components to their scheduled activities. The Cast Iron Cookoff’s beer competition and the legislative receptions of the BioScience Association and Tucker County  were good examples of the growing influence and impact small breweries are having in West Virginia. Seems like everyone wants to get on board. That’s a good thing.

State government moves in

If there was any doubt craft beer has arrived in WV, look no further than the state tourism agency. It came out with its own WV craft beer tourism promotion program.

Now, visitors to the Wild Wonderful WV website and WV Welcome Centers along the Interstate highways will see the fun opportunities our breweries and beer festivals offer. Word from the agency tells that the little guidebooks have been very popular. They are currently undergoing a revision to keep them up to date with the fast growing number of breweries.

Marketing gets more competitive

With the growing number of West Virginia breweries added to all the new brands entering the state, craft beer marketing and retailing got more competitive this year. More brands were out actively promoting retailer events than ever before.

Tap takeovers, tastings, and other promotions seemed to occur weekly around the state.

New retailers popped up to specialize in craft beer. Other retailers added more taps for their growler stations. Specialty bottle shops opened, like Beertopia in Morgantown and Bonded By Bottles in Huntington, and immediately raised the bar.

Larger craft beer brands may lead the way in bar promotions, but local breweries such as Big Timber, Greenbrier Valley, and Bridge Brew Works were also very active in this arena.

Beer distributor realignments were also influenced by the growing craft beer market. Late in the year, Mountain State Beverage took another step toward becoming a true statewide craft-beer-centric distributor.

Companies like Oscar Blues, Country Boy, New Belgium, Bells, and Devils Backbone are regulars in the local promotion scene. It’s great to finally be getting all this attention from the big craft beer breweries. It certainly makes West Virginia much more livable.

Everybody is planning a new brewery

West Virginia saw a record number of new breweries open in 2016, but had many more in planning.

Our best count, we ended the year with at least 10 more breweries in one stage of development or another. Will they all get opened? It’s too early to tell.

Some of the ones we’re excited about are Front Porch Brewing in Charles Town and Weathered Ground in Cool Ridge. These two breweries promise to get more West Virginia terrior into the bottle with rustic farmhouse styles, saisons, sours, wild yeasts, and local ingredients.

With each new brewery, a different dimension of the craft beer universe is unleashed for exploration. Each brings new business to a state that really needs it. First and foremost, each new brewery is a small business that adds dollars to the local economy, employs people, and strengthens the self-image of community where it’s located. Don’t take any of them for granted.

Support your local breweries and help them get better.

A final take

We can’t end our review of 2016 without mentioning our breweries’ role in helping West Virginia families hurt by the massive June floods. Several of our breweries, though very small businesses, stepped up and did their part for flood relief. We are very proud of them all.

So we end the year in West Virginia beer on an upbeat note. Cheers to a prosperous and beerful 2017.

Link to Part One of the Year in WV Beer.