Tom Nickel throws the best beer festivals. He’s like a master painter, except instead of a paintbrush and paint, he uses beer and Pizza Port Carlsbad’s beer garden. We’ve been bugging him for details about the upcoming Real Ale Festival, and he just fired this email over. All bolding was done by me.
“The San Diego Real Ale Festival will be Friday, April 15th and Saturday, April 16th at Pizza Port Carlsbad. The festival will feature all cask conditioned beers from breweries like Bear Republic, Avery, AleSmith, Grand Teton, Triple Rock, Hollister, Green Flash, Ballast Point, Alpine, Stone and many more! It is one of the largest collections of cask ales in the country! Every beer will be hand pumped through a beer engine. More than 50 beers are expected to be poured over the two days. The festival will run from 4 pm to 11 pm on Friday and from 11 am to 11 pm on Saturday. Cost is $30 which includes a festival Imperial Pint tasting glass and 8 taster tickets each good for a 4 ounce pour. Additional taster tickets will be just $1 each. There will be a special discounted rate starting at 7 pm on Saturday the 16th of just $20!
There will also be a VIP session on Friday the 15th from 1 pm to 4 pm in the afternoon. The session features limited ticket sales, food snacks provided by Pizza Port owner Vince Marsaglia and a great line up of VIP casks from Alpine, Green Flash, Ballast Point, AleSmith, Firestone, Lost Abbey and Pizza Port. Tickets for the VIP session are only available on line through Ticket Derby. The cost is $40 and the session is about 25% sold out at this point.
The link for tickets is: http://www.ticketderby.com/event/san-diego-real-ale-festival-vi-id-4883 or you can find it through the Festival page of the Pizza Port website. The VIP ticket includes admission into the Friday night session.”