You won’t have to ask about the terroir or provenance of the beers that you will be drinking if you have purchased (and you should have), your tickets to the 2nd annual Rock & Brews Local Craft Beer Festival. The kegs that will be tapped will not have traveled far. Some will be from right across the street! All you have to do is make your selections wisely.

How is this for a brewery list: Strand Brewing Co., El Segundo Brewing Co. (the aforementioned across the street), Cismontane, The Bruery, Eagle Rock, Monkish, Smog City, TAPS, Bootlegger’s, Golden Road, Hangar 24, Figueroa Mountain and Beachwood BBQ. That makes for a tough but delicious dilemma about which beers to use your tickets on. You could select by county, choosing from LA, Orange, Ventura, and Riverside. Or you could just have beers from breweries that are new to you or ones that you haven’t had recently. There are many ways to fully enjoy a festival like this one. Though I would suggest moving from lighter beers to dark for your afternoon near the coast.

And not only will you be getting eight pours, a commemorative glass to take home and a complimentary buffet. A portion of the proceeds from the Festival will go to benefit the charity City Year Los Angeles. You get great beer and the city of L.A. gets better. Sounds like a win, win (add two more wins for you Kings fans).

And this event will probably only get bigger as the years pass as more and more beer gets brewed here in the City of Angels, so now is the time to check it out so that you can say you were there back when Local Craft Beer Festival was new.

Your Beer of the Week and your Homework are rolled into one. Take one bottle of Stone Ruination IPA, which was the “first full-time brewed and bottled Double IPA on the planet” and then get a bottle of the new “lupulin-loaded” Stone Ruination Tenth Anniversary IPA.

Then find your favorite hop heads and do a taste test of the original and compare it to the 10th and see what happens next as your tongue gets coated in hop bitterness. This beer was named for how it ruined your palate and for the new version that came out on the 11th Stone “actually amped up everything,” according to Brewmaster Mitch Steele. “We added more malt to bring the abv up to 10.8%, and the amount of hops we used almost defies reason,” he jokes. “Stone Ruination IPA already uses 2.5 pounds of hops per barrel, which is more than double the amount we use in any other core beer. For this anniversary version, we went double again, and used a most impressive 5 pounds of hops per barrel!”

Find more of Sean Inman’s writing on his blog, Beer Search Party.