These days it seems every city has it’s own beer week, so where is Wollongong’s, you may be wondering.

Well it’s right here. Gong Craft Beer Week kicks off on April 29 and runs through to May 4. It was the idea of Scotty Morgan, who brews for Rocks Brewing Company in Sydney but lives in the Illawarra.

A few weeks ago he read the Wollongong Beer Week posts right here on this blog and sent me an SMS that basically said “how do you feel about doing another beer week next month?”. We threw a few ideas back and forth, and I thought that may have been where it ended. Next thing I know he’s organised a few events and created the Facebook page.

At this stage there are two events listed – the Craft Beer Crawl in a Cowboy Hat which kicks off at the Illawarra Brewing Company at 5pm on May 2 and a 7am bike ride from North Wollongong to Sandon Point on May 5. Both events are free and anyone is welcome.

But where are the rest of the events, you’re probably wondering. Well, that’s where you come in. See, the Gong Craft Beer Week is a community-run event – anyone can organise their own event. And if it’s suitable we can even include it on the Facebook page. The whole idea behind GCBW is simply to appreciate and encourage good beer in Wollongong (and the rest of the South Coast too).

Your event doesn’t have to be massive. It doesn’t even have to be public – it could just be you and a few mates at home drinking good beers. Off the top of my head, here are a few things you could do during that week:

* Get some mates who drink mainstream beer to give you $20 each and go and buy a range of craft beers. Then get together and taste them.
* Shout a macro lager-drinking work colleague a craft beer at lunchtime.
* Visit a craft beer venue and tell them how you appreciate what they’re doing. It can be hard sometimes blazing a good beer path in Wollongong.
* Have one of the llawarra Brewing Company beers at the Illawarra Brewery bar.
* Visit HopDog BeerWorks in Nowra.
* If you’re a homebrewer, get a friend round and make a brew with them. If you’re part of a homebrew club (you guys in the uni brewing club, I’m looking at you) organise a get-together where you try each other’s beers.
* Venues could even get involved by putting great beer on tap and bottle shops could organise a brewer from Sydney to come down do an in-store tasting.

Those are just a few ideas. I’m sure you can come up with heaps of others, so get cracking.

Oh yeah, the reason the word “winter” appears in the title of this post? Well that’s because we’ll probably do it all over again in spring.

UPDATE: If you’re on Twitter there is a hashtag for the event #gongcraftbeer