For Wiseacre, Taste the Rarity is like a ‘wedding reception you get to have every year’

About 900 people gathered today at Wiseacre Brewing Co.’s original location on Broad Ave. for the 8th annual Taste the Rarity beer festival.

The event highlights breweries from all over the country, and features some of the best and weirdest beers around.

For brewer Davin Bartosch, who co-founded Wiseacre in Memphis with his brother 10 years ago, the event is a chance to reconnect with many friends he grew up brewing with.

“It’s kind of like your wedding. You have a chance to cram together a bunch of people you’ve known for a long time, and drink beers, and have fun,” he said.

“It’s like a wedding reception you get to have every year.”

What separates Taste the Rarity from other Memphis beer festivals, Bartosch said, is its scope.

“This is, like, the not-regional beer fest. We’ve got small breweries from Portland, like Gigantic, and tons of breweries from Chicago. You should be able to try some things here that you can’t even buy locally and, most likely, you’d have to travel to try otherwise.”

Taste the Rarity’s origins

Davin’s brother, Kellan Bartosch, said the name for the festival came from a bottle sharing tradition started when he worked for Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

He would gather with some of his friends every week at a place called Khoury’s in Las Vegas.

“And we would joke if someone had a rare beer, we would say ‘taste the rarity,’ because even if it wasn’t good, we were all inclined to think it was good because it was rare,” Kellan Bartosch said.

“We would say ‘taste the rarity’ kind of as a joke then, and that became the name of this festival. So props to my friends out there.”

Like his brother, Kellan enjoys getting the chance to meet up with old friends at Taste the Rarity.

“We try to bring everyone down to Memphis,” he said, “and show them a good time.”