Beckley to host new beer festival

While there have been festivals that featured beer in the Beckley area previously, The Great Beckley Beer Festival may be the first organized by serious craft beer fans. It takes place Saturday, September 21, in downtown Beckley.

Lead festival organizer Jason Lockhart says this is an event put together by beer lovers. He says their team has traveled across the region “to almost every beer festival imaginable and are seeking to take all the best parts of each and bring them together for the definitive beer festival of southern West Virginia.” Honestly, the festival also seems as much a music festival as it is a beer festival, with nine top-notch musical acts scheduled to perform live throughout the day.

Organizers expect around two dozen breweries to be represented serving over 50 beers, plus a few exclusive limited edition selections available only in the V.I.P. section. They have 11 West Virginia breweries signed on, including Bridge Brew Works, Freefolk, Weathered Ground, Greenbrier Valley, Sophisticated Hound, Parkersburg Brewing, Mountain State, Berkeley Springs Brewing, Bad Shepherd, Big Timber, and of course, Beckley’s only craft brewery, Dobra Zupas.

Matt Mullins, who operates the Beckley-based beer tap and line cleaning service, Clean Lines LLC, has been involved with the festival since its inception and is helping organize the brewery side.

The festival will be held at the Beckley Intermodal Gateway (501 Neville St.), which Lockhart calls, “an event space one could argue was designed just for a beer fest.” Gates will open at 12 noon and close at 6:00 PM. Ticket cost is $30 for General Admission and $50 for V.I.P. Ticket Link

Major festival sponsors include Raleigh General Hospital, 103CIR, 93.5 The Buzz and United Bank. It’s great to see this line up of sponsors for a first-time beer fest.

The festival is a project of Beckley Artistic Endeavors, which is better known as simply the WVCollective. This is the same group that produced the WVPubfest events the past two years at Weathered Ground Brewery to raise money for public broadcasting.

Lockhart characterized the WVCollective as “a stand-up group of rag-tag do-gooders willing to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes to make things happen.” He notes that everybody involved in creating, planning, and running The Great Beckley Beer Festival are 100% volunteers.

Lockhart says The Great Beckley Beer Festival hopes to highlight “the amazing local talent that resides in the state, which includes an incredible lineup of breweries alongside an unbeatable and diverse lineup of local musicians, vendors, artisans, and food trucks.” The organizers want to create a recurring event in downtown Beckley geared towards a demographic that they feel is too often forgotten when the city itself is planning events.

All proceeds of the festival will support Beckley Artistic Endeavors-WVCollective, which describes itself a local arts non-profit that produces stage plays, musicals, concerts, festivals, and anything else they can come up with to embrace the wealth of talent and skill housed in the Mountain State. Some other projects of the WVCollective include the West-By-Bod-Waltz, productions of Little Shop of Horrors, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and their upcoming fall production Bat Boy: The Musical.

Festival Website Link