Welcome back to the Beer Week Chronicles! Tomorrow marks the start of New Hampshire Craft Beer Week, an event that began as a grassroots social media movement. Much like New Hampshire’s craft beer scene, beer week has undergone major development.
"In its infancy, beer week was more of a social media campaign than any type of organized event. During that first beer week we ran trivia and picture contests and didn't even have prizes to give out,” says Bill Walden, one of the organizers of New Hampshire Beer Week. “The public responded by talking about beer week to their favorite breweries, sharing pictures of themselves with their favorite New Hampshire beers, and playing our trivia game in overwhelming numbers. Also in that first year, Kevin Skarupa, an avid homebrewer and a well-known meteorologist from our local TV station WMUR, asked if we could help them find some breweries to feature on Cooks Corner. These TV spots have helped to get NH Craft Beer Week into mainstream media.”
To-date, that mainstream media has helped to promote beer tourism in the state of New Hampshire. “There are folks that are doing beer tourism of their own, and we’re slowly showing our state government that it’s a real thing,” says Scott Schaier, who represents Brew NH, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the beer industry in New Hampshire.
“Maybe you know about New Hampshire from Breaking Bad, or you have a cousin up here,” Schaier says, explaining that up until recently, New Hampshire wasn’t recognized for its burgeoning craft beer culture. “We’re raising awareness and letting people know that our personality is a little bit different here. . . . We pair beer with the outdoors. We’ve got a good backdrop."
Back for its third year, New Hampshire Beer Week has more tastings, homebrewers’ events, beer dinners, tap takeovers, and pub crawls than ever before. As always, the New England Brew Fest is the closing seminal event of the week.
“This is truly an organic effort helped by dedicated volunteers,” says Walden. “New Hampshire Craft Beer Week has continued to grow each year and it is my great hope that it will continue to do so as it takes on a life of its own.”