The Ohio Brew Week was everything a beer festival should be. For one solid week, beer took over the town of Athens, Ohio. Brewers lined the streets with kegs offering samples of their finest and most daring brews (A cabernet barrel-aged imperial raspberry vanilla porter, anyone?), restaurants featured dishes cooked with beer and each bar in the booze-friendly college town (Athens is home to Ohio University) was taken over by a different Ohio microbrewery.

Microbrewery Takeover 

Athens offers what only a college town can: an entire street of bars. The setup was perfect for the brew week. An Ohio microbrewery — ranging from the award-winning Great Lake Brewery to the obscure Zanezville Weasel Boy Brewing – took over each bar and served its own beer alongside the regular offerings. Accordingly, the weekend night crowds were an interesting mix of the beer-bellied brewing diehards and students, who drank their normal PBRs or Jack ‘n’ Cokes oblivious to the festival. 

The most impressive brewery was Jackie O’s, a local Athens brewpub. They offered an astounding 23 beers on tap, including several barrel-aged beers and three sours. My favorites included the OPA (Ohio Pale Ale), Sun Village (an India Pale Wheat) and Grand Wazoo Batch 2 (a bourbon barrel-aged sour dark ale with raspberries). I only wish I had ordered sample glasses instead of full pints so I could have tasted even more of their unique brews.

Brew Events

One highlight of the beer filled week was Friday’s Brew Choo Choo. Riders boarded a train and “chugged” (ha ha) down the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway through the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio. Each train car featured a different brewery.  Local musicians entertained the passengers, and area restaurants handed out samples of their appetizers. 

On the final day of the festival, Sat. July 18, festival organizers shut down Athens’ main street and held a beer-fueled block party called “Boogie on the Bricks.” Revelers bought tokens for $1 and used them to purchase samples of beer from the stands that lined the streets. However, getting up to buy the beer involved a mix of waiting and elbowing. The crowd was so dense, we had to huddle behind a tent to drink our hard won pints. The samples started at 3p.m. and were meant to last until 5p.m. However, most breweries’ kegs started sputtering out about 4p.m. Lesson learned: the early bird gets the ale.