ColLAboration's Inaugural Beer Garden: No Promises of 300 Beers Saturday, Just $5 Pints

www.collaboration.la

Tony Yanow

For some of us, the idea of attending yet another L.A. beer festival requiring high dollar tickets is reason enough to take a vow of silence this Saturday, April 9th, and enjoy our Lost Abbey brews in peace. That the web video promo for this year's LA Beer Fest, organized by the flush-pocketed local event planner Drink: Eat: Play, is a schizophrenic scene of beer revelers followed by frat house flashbacks from last year really doesn't make those promises of 300+ beers sound as great as it should.

And so we offer an alternative for your Saturday drinking enjoyment: ColLAboration, a new series of outdoor beer garden-style pop ups that will be happening on a monthly basis at various beer bars around town. Think leisurely afternoon sunshine discussions of that cask-conditioned ale that was just tapped, rather than the mad-dashes for the food truck line that will no doubt be happening on Sony's back lot.

The event is a collaboration (yeah, we get it) between Clay Harding of 38 Degrees Ale House, Brian Lenzo of Blue Palms BrewHouse, Ryan Sweeney of The Surly Goat and Verdugo, and Tony Yanow of Tony's Darts Away.

Sure, you need to cough up $10 for a special ColLAboratoin glass, but consider it a green beer initiative. You'll need that glass to get into all future beer gardens, but you'll find some pretty great small batch beers for $5 to $6, the going price for most mass produced beers these days.

If you believe in signs from above and such, Saturday's ColLAboration kick-off, which is also celebrating Tony's Darts Away's one-year anniversary, was one of the most-discussed topics at Sunday's inaugural Beer Church. And several of the beers on Saturday's promised list, like Lost Abbey's Angel's Share and later in the evening, Russian River's fantastically ethereal Sanctification, are Beer Church-approved, so you can get a jump on those Sunday services. Of course, that also means you'll essentially be buying Yanow a drink in celebration of his successful business anniversary rather than the other way around. But hey, it's arguably better than hanging out on a studio's back lot filled with sloshed beer t-shirt sorts, though we'll leave that to you to decide.