Ah, ’tis the season for our city’s budding home brewers to flex their skills in the annual Long Beach Homebrew Invitational hosted by Craft Beer LB. With tons of participants—you will find everything from budding IPA masters to those who just, frankly put, want to happily get you buzzed—it all goes down at Rancho Los Cerritos on Saturday, Mar. 29 from 1PM to 5PM.
The Long Beach Homenrew Invitational is just one part of Craft Beer LB’s grasp on keeping independent beer alive in Long Beach.
For Craft Beer LB founder and event organizer Dennis Trilles, the home brew is just one of beer events that he brings on. (Actually, that reads factually incorrect: With the addition of (the very, very underrated) Long Beach Sake Day and plenty of wine at many events, it is more appropriate to say that Dennis specializes in low-ABV events.)
To be frank, Dennis is the key to the city’s best beer festivals.
There’s his OG event, Craft Beer LB Fest—nearing a decade in existence—that has not just brought on our local breweries consistently but an array of regional brew hubs that have defined SoCal beer. There’s Halloween Hootenanny, an event he shares with Martin and Ryan Svab-Hughes—what I like to call the city’s definitive beer festival after introducing itself mid-pandemic as a way to reconnect in 2021. The success of the original Hootenanny birthed Halfway to Halloween Hootenanny…
And that is why Dennis Trilles, the man behind Craft Beer LB, is a nothing short of a Long Beach gem.
In short, Dennis has helped keep Long Beach’s craft beer scene alive in a way that the breweries can’t do on their own while also (genuinely) reconnecting people. And beyond that, he has helped uplift small businesses—Greg Beck, the owner of DTLB’s hidden gem, Sake Secret, is a co-host of Sake Day with Dennis—in ways that, like the breweries he features, go beyond what a business can do with a brick-and-mortar.
You can talk to the many people who do events in the city and they will echo the same sentiment: Dennis is humble, absurdly hard-working, and efficient when it comes to his events. Well-crafted, skillfully curated, they truly reflect what our drink festival culture is and could be as they evolve across the years.
