“Tulsa Craft Beer Week came about because the bar and liquor store owners in town wanted to create an identity for our beer scene,” says Chase Healey, the brewmaster at Prairie Artisan Ales.

Freddy Lamport, the owner of BierGarten Wine & Spirits in Jenks, Oklahoma, founded Tulsa Craft Beer Week in 2013 with the help of Josh Royal who owns R Bar & Grill. Lamport says his main reason for spearheading Tulsa’s Craft Beer Week is the “crazy, insane, restrictive” liquor legislation in the state of Oklahoma.

“You can’t have brewpubs here,” Lamport says. “[As a liquor store owner] I can only sell alcohol—no ice, no cocktail garnishes, no mixers, no glassware. I can’t have in-store tastings, and I can’t refrigerate.”

That no-refrigeration law was a driving force in Prairie’s decision to make farmhouse-style ales. “I wanted to make styles that made the most sense for our climate,” Healey says, referring both to the Oklahoma heat and the state’s fiery liquor laws. “Lack of refrigeration is most often a benefit [to farmhouse ales] for continued development.”

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Prairie will host an event every day for Tulsa Craft Beer Week, which begins on Thursday, April 10, and runs until April 19. The week of specialty tappings, beer dinners, tours, and a golf scramble concludes with the Foam Festival that Lamport hosts in the BierGarten’s parking lot. “I sell only 300 tickets because I want it to be a very intimate experience.”

The beer scene in Tulsa, says Lamporte, is small and niche and often perceived to be a hipster trend. Despite negative connotations with the “H” word, though, “it’s almost like that hipster mentality corresponds with what craft beer is in Tulsa,” he says, explaining that both are very localized.

In just one year, Oklahoma’s number of breweries has more than doubled, as has the reach of Tulsa Craft Beer Week. “I wanted to push craft beer to the next level, to grow the whole industry,” says Lamporte. “Since [BierGarten] has done that, a lot of the stores in the state have followed suit.”

Also since beer week’s inception, a law was passed in Oklahoma allowing breweries to give away samples. They can now pour twelve ounces per person, per day for guests.

Unlike many other beer weeks across the country, and primarily because of Oklahoma’s limiting liquor laws, Tulsa Craft Beer Week is mainly facilitated by liquor stores, instead of brewers, state guilds, or other associations. “When we were starting beer week, we thought let’s generate culture,” says Lamporte. “And how do we do that? Because we can’t bring people to the beer, we’ll have to take beer to the people.”

Visit the Tulsa Craft Beer Week website to find schedules and details.