One of Milwaukee’s best beer festivals is coming home.
Gathering Place Brewing announced last week that the 2024 Lager & Friends, its annual celebration of that family of beer styles, will be held June 22 at Gathering Place’s Riverwest brewery and taproom.
Lager & Friends has bounced around venues since it began in 2019 at Turner Hall. It went virtual in 2020 and 2021 – with a box of beers and Zoom panels of brewers and other experts talking about technical and cultural aspects of lager – and for the past two years has been held at Old Heidelberg Park at Bavarian Bierhaus in Glendale.
“Bavarian has been a good host to work with this event in the past,” said Joe Yeado, Gathering Place owner and Lager & Friends organizer. “But as we were thinking about the festival and how to grow it and how to keep it fresh and different, one of the things that came to mind was to bring it back to our home base.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Now, the tents from which the two dozen or so participating breweries pour will be set up along Vienna Avenue, with tables and chairs for patrons in the street as well. It’ll be a similar setup to the block parties Gathering Place occasionally hosts, including the Riverwest Food Truck Rally that drew more than 1,500 people over three hours last July. Yeado expects to sell about 300-plus Lager & Friends tickets this year. Yeado notes the streets in Gathering Place’s part of Riverwest are wide, and the blocks are long: “We have plenty of room here.”
Old Heidelberg’s open-air pavilion and sprawling, beer garden-like grounds were perfect for th’s festival, but Yeado said the event’s sixth year was time to bring it home for multiple reasons.
Yeado said he felt the large grounds made it feel like a smaller event than it actually is. “We like that it’s a smaller, more intimate festival,” he said. “We’re hoping for modest growth over last year, but we’re not looking to make this a 1,000-person event. We think it would lose the character if it were that large.”
Inside, the taproom will be set up with theater-style seating for the return of the panels of experts. “People liked the panel discussions that we did during the COVID years,” he said. “People found them to be informative and entertaining.”
A unique aspect of Lager & Friends is its inclusion of out-of-state breweries, some of whom do not normally sell beer in Wisconsin, In past years that has included Breakside Brewing of Oregon, Kansas City Bier Co., Sketchbook Brewing of Illinois and Chicago’s Dovetail Brewery – before it began regularly distributing to Wisconsin.
Due to a quirk in Wisconsin’s beer laws, it was possible for Bavarian Bierhaus – which had a slightly different license – to host a festival with out-of-state breweries while Gathering Place couldn’t. That difference in licensing was removed as a result of the sweeping overhaul of alcohol regulation signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers last fall.
That led Yeado to adjust 2024 planning to realize the longtime goal to holding Lager & Friends at Gathering Place. The details of the new rules arising from the new law are still being finalized, and while Yeado expects them to be in place by the festival’s date, he can’t take the chance that they won’t, so he’s pursuing in-state brewers only for this year’s festival. The goal is to showcase lager-forward brewers from corners of the state that don’t see a lot of exposure in Milwaukee, he said, citing western and northern Wisconsin in particular.
“We’re really excited,” he said. “This festival is a labor of love in a lot of ways. We are fortunate that there’s a strong group of people who keep coming year after year, and we want to put together a program that keeps them coming back and also entices new people.”
The event runs from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 22. Tickets go on sale March 1 at lagerandfriends.com.
