If you were among the 3,500 people who made it out to Naperville last Saturday, you enjoyed a beautiful day with lots of great beer from far and wide.
I went primarily as a beer drinker, hanging out with my friends and enjoying myself. But it’s not like I can turn off the marketer—the marketer always wants to understand the consumer’s perspective, after all.
The big picture: It was a great time in a great location. In fact, it may be one of the most pleasant beer fest experiences I’ve ever had.
In the spirit of transparency, I should mention that I’ve written several blogs for both the Chicago and Naperville Ale Fests. I was paid for those, and while I’m not being paid to review this event, I hope to do more work with Josh Seago in the future. So, I’m not interested in complaining about what did or didn’t make me personally happy—this isn’t Facebook. Instead, I want to offer candid thoughts about how next year could be even better.
Hits
For me, the festival mostly hit it out of the park. Like I said, it ranks up there with my favorite festivals, and this is for several pretty basic reasons.
The Naper Settlement Makes a Great Venue
The Naper Settlement stood out as a great space for this kind of event. It’s basically a kind of pioneer town, with beautiful (or at least interesting) buildings, brick walkways, and lots of trees! That meant you could always find some comfortable shade to hang out and sip your beer while chatting with your buddies. There was even a mister by the church for a different form of liquid refreshment.
Um, Great Beer, Of Course
One of my friends said he was batting 1.000 for beers up until the last two or three, they were that good. I had a similar experience. There were beers I didn’t love, but nothing that I really disliked.
Okay, so I failed to take notes, which was probably a missed opportunity, but looking over the online beer list, I can definitely recall some of the standouts that I’d like to try again, including:
- Destihl Syncopathic Sour
- Penrose Wild W4 Sour
- Stone Ghosthammer IPA
- Ballast Point Unfiltered Sculpin IPA
- 5 Rabbit Ironica IPA
- Ommegang Pale Sour
- Soundgrowler Pitchfork Saison
I guess I was feeling the sour vibe that day.
Themed Booths Created Fairground Feel
I don’t know if they’ve done this in the past, but this year there were several booths identified not by their brewery but by a theme: Lager Lane, Christmas in July, the House of Funk, and Cider Alley –not to mention Left Hand’s all nitro tent.
Josh Seago called them “Mini Festivals,” which works as a large umbrella term for the variety of tents. To me, they created something of a fairground feel, like there were little neighborhoods or locations within the larger location. It felt like you were going somewhere that was different than just “over there.”
Plenty of Water and Dump Buckets
This may seem counterintuitive, since one goes to a beer fest to drink beer, not to dump it out to replace it with water. However, I was at a different fest recently that had surprisingly sparse water and bucket stations, and it irritated us.
Here’s the thing: I don’t go to a beer fest to get drunk. I often wind up much tipsier than I’d prefer, but that’s because I’m excited to try so many beers rather than because I have been carelessly overindulging.
Water stations are an important part of a beer fest for at least three reasons:
- You can keep hydrated, which you’ll thank yourself for later.
- You can rinse your glass, which can be important when you’re going from a sour to, say, a kölsch.
- You can dump beer. If this seems weird, you’ve probably never been to a beer festival.
Great Food Options
Some of my buddies pooh-poohed food trucks, but they’re getting old or something. I get that they’re pricier than a restaurant and sometimes the wait is long, but they’re still a fun option for an event like this.
There were 8 or 9 trucks, as I recall, offering a range of international cuisines. I wound up with a Greek-inspired pork sandwich that almost had me going back for seconds.
So, win for the food trucks.
Misses
What, if anything, might I change about Naperville Ale Fest, Summer Edition to make it even cooler next time?
Here’s what I’d say to Josh Seago, were he to solicit my opinion on the matter. Which, he didn’t. But, still . . .
More Food Trucks
Nine food trucks seems like a lot, but when you have 3,500 people running around, drinking beer, and getting hungry, it still makes for long lines.
I wanted something solid to fill my belly about 3 pm, and I actually had to wait in three lines for food. The first two had to temporarily shut down to cook up some more food.
10% More Restroom Facilities
It must be brutal to guestimate how many port-a-johns and wash stations you’ll need, but I’d say it’s one of those things you’d want to err on the side of too many.
The lines for the restrooms weren’t horrible, but they were definitely lines, and the soap ran out before the end of the day.
Nix Cider Alley
Now, I already said it was cool to have a Cider Alley, but here’s why I think it’d be better to nix it and mix the cideries in with the rest of the breweries.
If you’re with beer people and want to spend an hour trying ciders, then Cider Alley was a convenient one-stop. However, if you are a cider person hanging out with beer people, well, you’d find it less convenient.
It was a big enough festival that you didn’t want to get too far separated from your friends. To keep supplied with cider, you’d either have to keep asking your buddies to go back to Cider Alley, which was sort of separate from the main beer tents, or you’d have to go off on your own regularly and try to find your friends later.
Someone on a designated driver ticket might feel similarly, I suppose.
Probably the ideal would be to spread the soda and cider booths throughout the beer booths, then have a color- or symbol-coded map that DDs and cider folks could consult. Then everyone could stay closer together.
Show Some Love for the Gluten Free Folks
Now, this isn’t really a criticism at all, but more an opportunity to draw even more people.
To my mind, the future of craft beer is drinker diversity. Yes, that means craft appealing more broadly to women and people of color (which is already happening), but it also means broadening the umbrella of what a beer drinker drinks.
That is, it will include cider making a play to become an option for a serious craft beer drinker. It will include the gluten free beer producers educating drinkers on the different qualities of a GF beer.
It will mean a beer fest where someone with gluten intolerance, or maybe even someone with celiac disease, could find plenty of options. (And, as with ciders, you’d want these sprinkled throughout.)
It’s possible another Illinois beer fest has had gluten free or gluten-reduced beer, but I’m not aware of any that promote themselves as being a place to find them.
So, it seems to me there’s a big dollar-shaped hole, there for anyone who wants to move on it…
Again, Seago & Co. deserve congratulations on a fun event. They took some chances, did some creative things. I have a lot of respect for that, and if they have data showing I’m wrong, I’ll cede my thoughts to the whims of public opinion on this one.
But here’s looking forward to 2018 Winter and Summer Editions!
Image via NapervilleAleFest.com
