For Certified Cicerone Zach Rosen, the challenge of creating unique beer-based events is a consuming passion. He loves a great venue almost as much as he likes his hops, and on Saturday, February 15, he’s got a live one. The Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology, a k a SBCAST , is one of the best-equipped event spaces in the city, and in addition, for Rosen, it’s also his home.
Having created such mind-bending boutique beer festivals as Hoptopia, five years of the Santa Barbara Beer Garden at the Botanic Garden , and, in 2018, Biegrnette: Light, Life, and Death, also at SBCAST, Rosen is joining forces with actor/directors Pacomio Sun and Marisol Miller-Wave to bring back ShakeSBeer, a concept he has presented once before in 2015 at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. The night will begin at 5:30 p.m. with a one-hour performance on the main stage, followed by an extended period until 9 p.m. during which the “directed experience” portion of the program kicks in.
Participants are challenged to fill their cups at a variety of different stations around the space, each of which will have both scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and beers paired with the plays and their characters. For example, SBCAST has a hot tub, and for Rosen, the decision of who to put in it was an easy one. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course,” Rosen told me late one recent afternoon over a hazy IPA at Third Window on Haley Street. “They’re Hamlet’s bros from school, so you know they would find the hot tub.”