Madison Craft Beer Week was born in 2011. It was precocious from the start. Even that first year, it was more than an actual week long — it ran for 10 days.
It grew out of the Madison Home Brewers and Tasters Guild and a desire to build on the excitement that occurs every year in early May as the Guild releases tickets for the Great Taste of the Midwest, its large annual festival at Olin Park each August. It ends on Mother's Day, usually good for scheduling brunch events.
Bill Rogers, who along with Robyn Klinge and Jeff Glazer co-founded craft beer week, remembers buying the domain name several months before any planning started.
“I remember being really stressed out the first year as we were closing in on the registration deadline and had no events,” Klinge says. “Then on the last day of registration, the Old Fashioned and Vintage Brewing Company submitted events for every day of the week.” That, says Klinge, “opened up the floodgates and reassured everyone else that this was a real thing.”
Dexters and Maduro were other early adopters, according to Rogers.
Madison Craft Beer Week was a hit from the start. In its first year there were over 100 different venues and activities. “That first year blew our minds,” says Rogers. Today that number has quadrupled.
Benefits of the event extend far into the community and the economy. Rogers notes that craft beer week was instrumental in bringing breweries from elsewhere in the state into Madison. He also feels that it jump-started the influx of tap houses in the Madison area.
“Craft beer week gets people to places they may not have been before, trying new beers and restaurants,” says Rogers. “When [I] see so many bars, restaurants and other places getting on board, it’s rewarding.”
And, “It’s a great way to start coming out of the shell of winter,” says Jeff Glazer.
A number of cities throughout the country hold craft beer weeks. Madison and Milwaukee were the first cities to organize beer weeks in Wisconsin. In the early stages Madison organizers followed many of the ideas they learned from similar efforts in cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco and American Craft Beer Week.
One aspect that has worked well for Madison is the independent nature of craft beer week. In some cities, a single industry entity like a beer distributorship or a single brewery runs the event. This can make it challenging to gain buy-in from the overall beer industry in that community.
Over the years, the number and type of events in the Madison week have grown. “Venues do a great job of engaging with the breweries and holding events that are creative mash-ups of the brewery and the venue,” says Glazer.
Brewer appearances are often part of beer release parties. In 2015, Wisconsin Brewing Company’s Kirby Nelson showed up at Tex Tubb’s Taco Palace for the release party of his “Weizenbock to the Future,” driving a DeLorean and wearing a white lab coat like Doc from the movie Back to the Future.
Special-release beers, tap take-overs, beer pairing dinners and educational programs make up the bulk of the events. In 2012 the Cask Beer Fest was added.
Getting local homebrewer participation in creating beers is another growing aspect of craft beer week. In 2014 and again this year, teams of students in UW-Madison food science and fermentation programs have competed for the chance get their beer recipes produced by Wisconsin Brewing. The winning beer is released in time for craft beer week. Several other local brewers also hold homebrew competitions, where the winner’s beer becomes part of special release parties.
However, no beer takes the spotlight like Common Thread. Each year over a dozen brewers from throughout Wisconsin come together, select a style of beer to make, and brew it collaboratively. In 2012, its debut year, it was a California Common, in 2013 a bier de garde, in 2014 a Bohemian pilsner, and last year a Belgian tripel. This year, a Gose will be the featured beer style.
Success eventually led to a need for more support than Rogers, Klinge or Glazer could offer. All three have full-time jobs. That’s when last fall Isthmus stepped in to provide the overall coordination of Madison Craft Beer Week. Which brings us to the present day.
Madison Craft Beer Week will be held April 29-May 8 this year, and it is expected to draw the largest number of participating venues since it began in 2011.
