BottleRock 2017: The Year of the Craft Beer

There's more to BottleRock than great music - like epic beer.


BottleRock Napa Valley drew 120,000 music lovers over the three day Memorial Day weekend. As eighty bands served up a torrent of tunes on the festival’s four music stages — Maroon 5, Warren G,  House of Pain, Foo Fighters and Tom Petty fan favorites — festival food, wine, and craft beer helped to keep the energy up. The best local eateries served savory and sweet dishes for foodies while the Bay Area’s finest breweries provided ample wherewithal to wash it all down… oh so smoothly.

“I just love the beer selection this year; my favorite — Barrel Brothers HibisKISS beer — is a perfect brew for a sunny day,” enthused Jen Polston of Santa Rosa.

While brew aficionados tended to the ecstatic in their excitement for BottleRocks’s beer garden; brewers leavened their enthusiasm with a grain of the pragmatic. Partner John Lilienthal of 101 North Brewing, suppliers of Heroine IPA for the last three years, commented,

“It’s good exposure and worth the marketing dollars for us because they (festival-goers) buy enough beer for us to break even. And all craft beer was in the beer garden, so craft drinkers knew exactly where to go.”

Lagunitas, a sponsor of the three-day event, while no longer technically “craft” after their buyout by Heineken, continues to serve up some incredible beers. Despite Lagunitas’s disqualification as a “craft beer” due to brewery size, we’d like to unofficially grandfather them into the “craft” category — for their long and pioneering history as a Sonoma County “craft beer.”

Check out the gallery above for an inside look at the fun all the craft beer drinkers were having at BottleRock Napa Valley this year.