There are a couple of upcoming events

Dec 1 is the traditional release of Big Time's barleywine, old wooly. A bunch of the old timers from the Cascadia beer geeks mailing list get together to try the new vintage and buy it up fast. It generally only is sold that day and maybe one or two more, from Big Time Ale House, though it has popped up at the Bottleworks barleywine fest in years past. They do offer 22oz bombers for take out.

The Washington Brewer's guild is doing a winter beer festival at Hale's brewery at 43rd and Leary in Freelard on Dec 2.
www.washingtonbeer.com/wbf.htm
their servers are down right now, but you can read a cached version on google if you search hale's and beer fest. $20 gets you six tastes, you get a few more free if you pre-order tickets. It runs all day, noon-10PM. 30 winter beers will be available.

A good source for updates on these things used to be the cascadia beer email list, mentioned above. I didn't renew my membership when I left the UW, so I don't know if it stalled out in the last five years. Traffic on the list was already a little slow, but I was still getting notices of the big festivals.
www.cascadebrewersguild.org/casc...s.asp
Since it's hosted on the CBG website, it's down right now, too, but here's the details:

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I mainly just try to hit the same annual ones. I do Old Wooly every year. The bottleworks barleywine festival is a february treat, though they went from the cool single event format held at the Phinney Neighborhood association to just putting a huge amount of barleywines on tap at Brouers pub in Fremont. Father's day has the Berwer's guild summer beer taste. It used to be held at Marymoor park, but they brewer's guild was shut out by the promoters, and they started their own at the seattle center. the old promoters still run a beer fest at marymoor on the same day. July brings the International Beer festival at seattle center. I really like the Phinney neighborhood Association's winter beer festival, held in early november. It was last weekend. I unfortinately had to miss it this year, but that's really fun.

Shamus

Thanks guys, I will deffinitly hit some of these events. I get especially excited about beer that has limited availability. I don't even want to talk about how much I spent shipping beer home from a visit to the Three Floyds Brewery in Indiana.
Perhaps I'll see you at these events, do say hi if you recognize me.