IPhoto crashes on import

What worked for me was a permissions repair. Go to /Applications/Utilities, and open Disk Utility. Select your boot drive/partition, go to the First Aid tab, and click Verify Disk Permissions. Let it work, and see what it says. If it says you should, click Repair Permissions.

Perhaps doesn't directly answer your question, but sounds like you ought to consider creating a Beer album, rather than using a Beer event.

iPhoto Events are really designed for arranging temporally-related photos, i.e. photos that were taken in a similar time period. Albums are better for storing contextually-related photos, i.e. photos of the same thing over any period of time.

Albums work like iTunes playlists, in that the same photo can appear in multiple albums, or in no albums at all. (But it has to appear in exactly one event.) Albums are always visible in your sidebar, so you can easily drag photos from any event (including your "Latest Import" event, for example) into any album at any time.

All that said, somebody here could probably quickly whip up a little AppleScript for you that automates your current process. But not me :)