Oakshire goes to Boston.

Ahhh…Beantown, the site of this year’s Craft Brewers Conference.  Jeff and Matt(and beerwife Eriel) got a chance to travel across the country to learn, network, and of course sample great beers from the East Coast and around the country.  Yes, believe it or not our industry does have a professional conference to teach, to promote and to bring together a small but growing group of like minded people.  We attended sessions on Sustainability, technical brewing, expanding our business, and so much more.  We attended hospitality events like cask night put on by the MBAA distric New England, the opening reception sponsored by Harpoon (a very nice IPA as the flagship)-btw thanks for the tour Rich Doyle, we snuck in with the distributors and enjoyed every minute-, and a food and beer pairing reception at the closing of the conference.  There were also some great beer bars there too. Sunset Grill comes to mind, along with Jacob Wirth. And no trip to Boston is complete without traveling to Cambridge Brewing Company. Great beers and a lot of them.

The water taxi ruled. Here’s top Oakshire couple Jeff and Eriel waiting to depart  and on the boat.

We had to take this back and forth from our hotel each day.  Nice when the sun was shining, but not so much during the rain.

Of course the food was great. We had lots of chowder and I even snuck a lobster at No Name Seafood Restaurant.

Finally, we were fortunate to get taken to a Red Sox baseball game by the Country Malt Group. Thanks guys!! My first time to historic Fenway was great.

It was great to see all my old buddies from the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild (see you in Chicago for CBC 2010) and make some  new ones along the way. Thanks to all the suppliers we hung out with. Oh and thanks to Joe for working like a dog while I was out “learning, researching, and networking”.

‘Twas a long week, but a great one. Now back to the whirlwind known as Oakshire Brewing expansion.

Peace out!

Matt