I was fortunate to be a judge at last night’s #Coldchela 2018 a brewfest featuring 20 Latino Home Brewers that was held at the Roybal Foundation in East LA. While there will be a review coming I wanted to write about the cultural aspect of this event, the beer will have to wait. Ha! To be included in this group of judges was an honor in itself, we arrived early to start the judging but it took longer than we anticipated. No worries, the group provided so much insight to craft beer I sat there soaking in all the knowledge and I’m grateful for it. Coldchela started at 6 pm with a DJ spinning a wide variety of jams, he hit every genre that would be recognizable at Mexican wedding or Quinceanera, in other words he got the party STARTED! After the DJ’s set the group The Altons came on stage, of course we were still inside doing our thing, I honestly thought the DJ was still spinning records when Teo says,”Who are those guys?!!” They were so good and professional sounding I finished the beer I was grading and got up to go see this group who were playing such soulful music. I watched and listened as a young girl sang her song, the group played so well but I had to get back to the hard work of judging beer. I had no idea that when we finally finished it was around 8 pm, yes it took us 2 hours but I think that was necessary to do right for all the entrants. There were six of us and they divided us into groups, I was paired with Eric Santos and we were given 7 beers to judge, the other 2 groups were given 6 beers each to judge. We graded on Aroma, Appearance, Taste and Mouthfeel, then we gave a final overall score, a perfect score would be a 50 and I did give a 50 to one beer. While I didn’t taste a bad beer there were some that were not balanced, they were good but one was too hoppy, I couldn’t taste any malts, and so on. So when we finished I had to figure out where to start, I walked the perimeter of the beer fest saying Hi to everyone, looking at the beers they were pouring, I wanted to say Hi to the OG groups of SoCal Ceveceros, I got to know them last year when I wrote about their event, so I made my way all the way to the far end where South Central Brewing was set up, I tried their Café de Olla Brown ale and it was excellent! the food was nearby so i grabbed a couple of tacos and gobbled them down before I went on to the next homie, Preston Brewing from Long Beach, Lewis Martinez who is the assistant brewer at Belmont Brewing. Lewis didn’t enter the competition but his beers were solid! a Hazy IPA, a Pineapple Pale Ale and an AbuelitaChocolate beer.
By now the second group was on stage, Casa de Calacas, a high energy Latin hybrid band with a kick ass horn section and a charismatic lead singer/ bass player. I, like a lot of people were mesmerized by this group, I went Live on Facebook to broadcast their performance. People were dancing away enjoying everything that Coldchela had to offer, SoCal Ceverceros did a fantastic job in setting this up. I saw some comments on Instagram this morning and it seems everyone had a great time, “ this was the dankest beer fest I’ve been to!” said one comment. This gathering of Latino home brewers foretells the future of craft beer with POC showing that craft beer is inclusive to all. You could feel the passion when talking to the brewers they all were so happy to share their brews and welcomed any critiques. The idea is to help one another, home brewing is a community, it’s about family and you could see the support given by the wives and girlfriends who also participate in the process. Last year’s beer fest has tripled in size so I’m predicting that Coldchela 2019 will be held at the Pico Rivera Arena! AmIRight?!!
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