Beer Culture Summit Comes to Chicago October 24-27
The first conference of its kind
The Beer Culture Summit will bring together academics, museum staff and beer industry insiders in a hybrid conference that synthesizes elements of all three professions. Garibay explained its origin:"I spend a lot of time at academic conferences, I spend a lot of time at museum conferences, I spend some time at beer industry conferences, and they're all really interesting experiences, but they're also very isolated. They're very isolated to a specific group of people interested in very specific things . . . The summit was born out of my desire to create a mashup of those three industry conferences, so that we would bring together people from each of those different fields to have a conversation and share information, share their knowledge, but also have a dialogue with people from different industries."[caption id="attachment_60661" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Credit: The Chicago Brewseum[/caption] This "mashup" extends to the summit's venues, which range from the Field Museum and Chicago History Museum to Goose Island and Girl and the Goat. "It was important to me to have our daytime sessions be at cultural institutions, because we (Chicago Brewseum) are first and foremost a cultural institution," Garibay said. "I also wanted to make sure we tapped into some of our great breweries and bars, so our evening events are at breweries and bars." In many ways, those breweries and bars offer their own window into beer history and culture. For example, Friday night's events take place at Metropolitan Brewing, which focuses on the same German brewing tradition that many of Chicago's 19th century immigrants brought to the city 150 years ago. The hybrid approach also includes the sessions themselves: a single Saturday event includes the words gender, race, class, sex and beer in the title, while Sunday afternoon is essentially a choose-your-own (beer) adventure. "Sunday, I wanted to have a day where everyone could get out into the city and really choose what they wanted to do," she said. Garibay will herself lead a walking tavern session that day, allowing summit attendees to simultaneously explore the city on foot while also burning a few beer-related calories accrued over the weekend. Mixing and matching is both inter-session and intra-session, as panelists come from a variety of both personal and professional backgrounds. There will be plenty of diversity on display, even within the beer industry. Thursday night's session features John Hall, founder of Goose Island (now owned by AB-InBev); Friday night's will highlight Julia Herz, Craft Beer Program Director at the Brewers Association (the trade group representing independently owned breweries). In other words, the conference is neither put on by "big beer," nor limited to those who are proudly independent. Rather, it's representative of the complex economic landscape of beer in America. Most of all, the summit will reflect a hodgepodge of attendees, which Garibay hopes includes plenty of civilians. "I really just want the public to attend. We have this group of people coming to Chicago from all over the country to have these conversations and this is truly an opportunity for the beer-loving public, the history-loving public, the culture-loving public to have access to them. To know that there are people not from the beer world, the history world or the academic world in attendance—that to me would be the most successful thing to happen."