An astute reader emailed yesterday to ask why this story in Thursday’s newspaper, about the Chicago Craft Beer Week events I’m most eagerly anticipating, included happenings not listed on the official CCBW web site. I’ll try to keep the explanation simple.

Seeking to unify and organize the event in its second year, members of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild hired the group behind New York Craft Beer Week to organize this year’s Chicago event. They did that by creating the web site and selling $10 passports that allow entry to a handful of “featured events” throughout the week. Several bars paid $250 to be a part of this contingent and sell the passports (each got 35 passports, meaning they can make money for every sale over 25).

Others, however, declined to be part of this centralized effort and are hosting events on their own. Those events are therefore not listed on the CCBW web site.

One bar worker who declined to participate, but did not want to be named so as not to alienate friends in the industry, did not like the idea of paying to be part of the event.

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“We’re not going to pay to be part of something we already do on a regular basis, which is celebrate craft beer,” the person said. “The idea would have made sense 10 years ago or 10 years from now. Ten years ago there wasn’t the Internet and apps on phones where you can easily find where events are happening. Ten years from now, when we have people coming in from out of state for this thing, we might need it. Right now Chicago Craft Beer Week is for Chicagoans and these people already know to go to Hopleaf and Small Bar and Map Room. They don’t need a book to tell them that.”

Josh Schaffner, organizer of Chicago Craft Beer Week, said this afternoon, “The idea of Craft Beer Week is to be a universal presentation of all the great beer drinking opportunities in Chicago, so it’s unfortunate anyone wouldn’t want to be a part of that. At the same time presenting those events and venues and publicizing them is a very cost and labor intensive process so there has to be revenue somehow.”

The unfortunate product of all this is no central repository for the dozens of craft beer events across the city during the next week. I’ve attempted to link to several of them below, which should help make shopping a little easier.

The official CCBW events page is here.

It’s not the easiest on the eye, but this calendar at the Great Brewers web site has several events not on the CCBW page. The beermenus.com web site also has many listings.

Here are calendars for Metropolitan Brewing, Half Acre, Goose Island. The Beer Mapping Project has also compiled some events. So has this PR firm.

Finally, if you see nothing in any of the links from your favorite beer bar, they probably still have something going on (or lots of things). So check their web sites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds or, better yet, stop by.

Now get drinkin’.