It wasn’t the sailboats. It wasn’t the seaplanes. It wasn’t the breathless shimmer of Lake Union refracting through pints of imperial murk beneath a rain-stained Seattle sky. It was everything else. It was Beer Camp Across America, Sierra Nevada’s roving bacchanal of barley and soul, pitching its hop-soaked tents yesterday in South Lake Union Park like some gloriously tipsy carnival of the gods. Forget dusty fairgrounds or concrete convention halls—this was beer in its natural habitat: between the Space Needle and the soft growl of the sea, framed by food trucks, tulip glasses, and the slow-swoon guitar lines of Deep Sea Diver. It rained, of course. This is Seattle. But no one cared. Campers were grinning, glass-in-hand, and happy as hell.
Ken Grossman, the wizard of Chico himself, poured beers at the Sierra Nevada booth, which hosted the day’s longest line—less for the Barrel Aged Narwhal (though oh yes, worth it) than to high-five the man who made craft beer not just cool, but canon. Other lines? Rare. Crowds? Civilized. Herd-drunk chaos? Blissfully absent. The beer gods smiled as Northwest darlings like Cloudburst and Barley Brown’s ran dry before the clock struck five, their final pours greeted like sacred last rites.
Sierra, being Sierra, went beyond the tents: they brewed six collaborative, region-defining beers with 31 breweries across the country, bottled into one-time-only variety packs. There was the Moxee-Moron Imperial Session IPA—a citrus-drenched, Yakima-worshipping marvel co-brewed with Bale Breaker, Melvin, Odell, and others—which managed to be both imperial and sessionable, like a monk doing keg stands on a mountaintop.
The light stuff sparkled, too. E9’s tartalicious Nefilibata Sour? An airborne daydream. Belching Beaver’s tropical Here Comes The Mango and Viva La Beaver Mexican Chocolate Milk Stout offered, respectively, sun-soaked fruit and velvet thunder. Alesong’s Strawberry Gose, Black Raven’s spicy Three Sundays Tripel, and Trap Door’s apricot funk bomb A Gose Called Quest were each tiny riots of fruit, acid, and ecstasy in a glass. But the clouds kept calling, and the stouts answered: Stout of the Union—a deep, malty thunderclap co-brewed with Bagby, Beachwood, Smog City, The Lost Abbey, and Societe—was a revelation. So was Top Rung’s Pyrolysis Imperial Stout, kissed by red wine barrels and fire.
And yes, Sierra remembered the water. Water stations, refillable bottles, gentle hydration reminders between sips of oblivion—proof that even among hundreds of beers, common sense can be delicious.
Download the Beer Camp app for a full list of who poured what. Or just relive it the way we did: with sticky fingers, a tulip glass, and a heart full of malted gratitude.
