Summer is beer festival season, and one of my all-time favorites is getting nearer. The OC Brew Ha Ha is by far the best local (for those of us in Southern California) beer festival of the summer. I've been a loyal attendee and fan since the the inaugural event four years ago, and each year the festival gets better and more popular. This year's event is shaping up to be an incredible one. 

Since it started in 2010, the OC Brew Ha Ha has become Orange County's premier beer festival. The organizers do a fantastic job bringing in both the stalwarts of the craft beer industry (Stone, New Belgium, Sierra Nevada, Deschutes, Lagunitas, and Firestone Walker, for example), but you'll also find much smaller breweries and some who have just started brewing.  

Indeed, it's the small brewers and upstarts who I most look forward to visiting. Scanning my notes from previous festivals shows I've tasted the first year's productions of many of Southern California's now popular brewers: Old Orange Brewing Company, Golden Road, Tustin, Smog City (When they were still brewing out of Tustin), Beachwood, Monkish, I & I, Inland Empire Brewing, Ritual Brewing, and many others.