Screenland’s Crossroads location may get more attention lately, but the Armour location has an ace up its sleeve. Winner of the Best Beer Festival 2014 from The Pitch Weekly, Arts & Crafts Festival is a two day festival that will take place on August 21st and 22nd at Screenland’s North Kansas City location on Armour. They promise the most rare craft beers, the best live local music, great local artists, film premieres, and more.
Along with being the sponsor of the event, 4 Hands Brewing Company will also host a Short Film Competition in conjunction with Kansas City Film Festival and Screenland Theatres. The top ten films submitted will be chosen by a panel of experts and will be screened at the festival on August 22. The winner will be chosen by a live panel during the screening and will get to work with 4 Hands and Screenland to create a unique short film advertising the brewery to be played at Screenland Theatres for no less than six months. The film must feature craft beer in some way. If you enjoy film making and beer, this would be a fun project.
I attended last year and it was a more cultured event than typical beer festivals. I was able to enjoy documentaries, indie films, exclusive and rare beers, local artist and bands, an industry Q & A, and food vendors. At the start of each day, the space was too small to accommodate the crowd. Their lobby should only hold about a third of the people who attended, but as events and screening opened up, the lobby opened up quite a bit. At the actual beer tasting on Saturday the live music was too loud for the space, but the beer was easy to get to. Some of the servers weren’t very knowledgeable of the beer, but most were actually from the brewery in which they were representing.
A portion of this year’s ticket sales will go to help support KC Pet Project.
Tickets are still available on their website, but will surely sell out as they are limiting it to 300 per day.
Boulevardia is this weekend. The event had its faults last year, but they seemed to have corrected some mistakes to make it a much more fun experience for attendees. Bands will be performing on three stages, beer will be flowing from several locations, handcrafted goods from local artists will be available for purchase, and there will even be a Ferris Wheel!
The app was released last week with the list of beers during the festival and at Taps & Tastes, including their official festival beer, Show-Me Sour.
We’ll be volunteering on Saturday, taking pictures, and handing out buttons.
Starting in 2009, a group of Brooksiders decided they like to homebrew and wanted to share that experience with friends, family, and fellow beer lovers, so they created the Annual Brookside Nanobrew Festival. For the first few years, there were just a handful of beers to be tried, but every year grew bigger. So in 2012, they upgraded to a larger festival called KC Nanobrew Festival. This year, over 50 homebrewers will be sharing over 100 of their creative beers.
A lot of people knew about New BelgiumClips Beer and Film event as evidenced by the amount of people that were there. Combined with the perfect weather, this event was a little too small for the Kansas City crowd. Enough space to put your blanket, but waiting in line for tokens and then beer took up to an hour. Tokens are great, but when there’s only one location to get them it can be frustrating. The timing was too small, as well. With just two hours before the film began, there was a lot to take in. Boulevardia had the right idea by having multiple locations for tokens and spreading their festival over three days.
The event itself was enjoyable. Although a bit too “hipster” for my taste, I get what kind of crowd they were trying to entice and there were a lot of them there. Bicycle valet, food trucks, postcards to send, an old-timey interactive display, a bubble movie set, and beers, of course, were all perks of the event at Theis Park. New Belgium knows how to make beer, so there were no disappointments there. Their Film Noir, a festival only release, was as they described – a Milk Dud in a cup and I like Milk Duds. They were also serving canned beers and sours.
I appreciate the event. It’s something unique to do outside the same, old (yet still fun) beer festivals Kansas City has multiplied in over the last few years. I arrived at 6:50pm, but would recommend getting there even earlier. Cans were being sold to early birds at 6:30pm and it gives you more of an opportunity to check out everything before the crowd arrives.
