[Updated] Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival – A Six Year Look at Invitees

[Update] – Trillium Brewing, who was thought to have dropped out of the 2018 festival lineup, has been added. Please help us tweet our wishes to Trillium that they bring their famous hoppy beers this year to the fest ;).

Firestone Walker unveiled their 55 invited 56 invited breweries that will be in attendance for the sold out Firestone Walker’s Invitational Beer Festival in Paso Robles this coming June.

This festival will house the most attending breweries out of the past seven years, and will be represented by 18 different states and eight different countries.

We are continuing our tradition from last year where we take a look at breweries who have been an invited brewery for all seven festivals, and we take a look at those who have been added and what breweries have dropped out.

Because there is no official word on how a brewery gets an invitation, we can only speculate, for fun of course, as to how a brewery gets invited and what might lead to a brewery dropping out from the list of invited brewers. My guess is that Brewmaster Matt Brynildson chooses a handful of brewers that he has met and has built a bond with over beer. There are some drops that seem obvious, like Wicked Weed and Golden Road, as they have both been dropped the year after being acquired by AB-InBev. Some breweries that were very cool five years ago but not so much anymore are still hanging in there, and we can only guess that there are some political aspects to the invitee list as well.

This year, we see that OtherHalf and Trillium Brewing fell off the list, but there is a slew of new additions that should please the crowd this year such as Alvarado Street, Green Cheek Beer, Jackie O’s, Modern Times, Monkish and Sante Adairius.

Please take a look at our spreadsheet to see how the lineup has evolved over the past six years.

CLICK HERE