Harbottle Brewing, 3820 S. Palo Verde Road, will be holding a beer competition this weekend, featuring breweries from across the city.

 Gerald M. Gay, Arizona Daily Star

You can celebrate one brewery’s anniversary while sampling creative new beers from across Tucson at Harbottle Brewing Company’s SMaSHed in the Desert Beer Festival this Saturday, Feb. 5.

The event, set to take place at Harbottle, 3820 S. Palo Verde Road, will feature four teams of two breweries apiece; Harbottle and 1912, Copper Mine and Dillinger, Button and Ranch Hand out of Eloy, and Borderlands and Firetruck.

Each team will serve new collaborations made from a single malt (Vienna), a single hop (Mosaic), and any ingredients that they so choose.

“Your creativity is the limit,” said Michael Figueira, co-owner of Harbottle. “If people want to add fruit, spices, make a sour beer, they can. They just can’t use any other malts or hops.”

For $30, guests will get 5-ounce blind samples of all four creations and vote for which one they like best.

They will also receive tickets for three additional tastes or one additional pint, a custom glass, access to food trucks and the opportunity to buy more tickets to try different beers offered by each of the breweries on-site.

The event will take place in the taproom, as well as in the front parking lot and the parking lot used by Chopstix Asian Diner next door.

“Lucky for us, Chopstix is closed on Saturday,” Figueira said. “There will be plenty of room.”

This will be the second time Harbottle has held the SMaSHed competition, the first taking place in March 2020, right before the world shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Figueira said the success of the first event made them want to try it again when the timing was right.

“The breweries got really creative,” he said. “No two beers were remotely similar.”

Harbottle is combining the competition with its fourth anniversary. While a chunk of its time open has been during a global pandemic, Harbottle has been making it work, Figueira said.

The lockdown in 2020 actually helped boost the brewery’s sales.

“We were making home deliveries of three to six crowlers each,” Figueira said. “Even when our taproom was closed, our regulars still stopped by every day. Instead of one to two pints, they were getting one to two crowlers to go.”

The brewery purchased a new canning line, which it has used to boost distribution in Tucson and Phoenix.

In the next few months, the plan is to add a small kitchen, capable of making sandwiches, pizzas, wings and pretzels; and to build out a patio across several of the parking spaces in front of the brewery.

SMaSHed will also become a regular annual event, “as long as the world stays semi-normal,” Figueira said.

The festival runs from noon to 6 p.m. and tickets can be purchased at tucne.ws/1jhx

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