City Pages Beer Festival

I had a great time at the beer festival!
I thought the lines were short considering the amount of people that attended. There was a good mix of local craft beer and some national brands to keep everyone satisfied. It seems as though there could have been more food options, but that’s just being picky. Overall it seemed to be well managed and lines were kept to a minimum, which is always the danger at events like these!

We were visiting from out of town and went to this festival with a bunch of family members. It was pretty crowded and the beer and food lines were long.
We thought it would have been nice to be able to samples beers and then buy a full beer or two of the ones we liked.
Band was fun to watch, plenty of bathrooms, easy entry. We felt for the price we would not do this festival again.

This was the second time I have been to this festival, I was also here in 2012. While the first experience was great it was raining and storming this year which made it much less enjoyable.
Pros
–Beer
–Fun people watching
–Music and games (beer pong and bags)
Cons
— Selection is not great and seems even worse than it was when I went 2 years ago. There were multiple tables of stuff like mikes hard lemonade, come on, it’s a beer festival!
— Expensive: make sure to find a deal, they always sell tickets on sale, we did the city pages daily deal and got 4 tickets for $ 45 vs the $ 35 normal price her ticket
— Food: in the past they had a few different food trucks, this time they made the parking lot smaller and only had 1 truck, one mobile pizza oven and one burger stand, it wasn’t very exciting
If you live close and get a good deal it’s a fun way to spend a Saturday evening. If you are a beer aficionado and are looking to expand your knowledge, stay away, you won’t be happy.

If you’re wanting to taste and sample complex and/​or obscure beers, you will be disappointed by this beer festival. That said, there are still many redeeming qualities that make this an enjoyable event:
GOOD
— Efficient entry process
— Plenty of port-​o-​johns
— Lots of eye candy
— Live music
— Mixed crowd (though generally a bit younger than you’d find at similar events)
— Good location
MEH
— Pretty mediocre beer selection
— Not many brewery reps on-​site
— Beer lines can get a bit long
This is more of a social event than a beer tasting, but there’s nothing wrong with that.