What it was like
A beer festival can be a parking lot with a tent, or it can be a lawn with the water right there and the afternoon light doing something to the whole thing. Same beer. Not the same day.
Liberty Station is why this one has lasted fifteen years. Seventy-odd breweries pour a couple hundred beers, heavy on seasonals and one-offs they do not truck around much, and the crowd is genuinely mixed: collectors chasing one specific barrel-aged thing standing next to people who came because it was a beautiful Saturday and a friend had a spare ticket. Food trucks along the edge, lawn games running the whole time, a cover band playing songs everybody pretends not to know every word of.
NTC Park on the waterfront, four hours, twenty-one and over.
It sells out every year. Ask the friend you always mean to catch up with, and make this the time you actually do.