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Five Years of Beer and Music Festival in Harrisonburg

The Rocktown Beer and Music Festival in Harrisonburg pairs a variety of local, regional and national craft beers with musical talent that ranges in genre from Americana to funk and rock.WMRA’s Kara Lofton reports on tomorrow’s Spring edition of the festival, now in its fifth year.

Jeremiah Jenkins is the production manager for Rocktown Beer and Music Festival. His job is to bring in bands from all over the nation such as Roddy Walston and the Business that you just heard. But for him, the music is really just a complement to what Rocktown excels at: a huge variety of really great craft beer.

JENKINS: Rocktown Beer and Music Festival really is a killer beer festival with good music, it’s not a music festival with good beer… You get ten four ounce samples of beers, there are 32 breweries each pouring two beers each there’s also some ciders included, but you really get to try lots of different kinds of beers, and many of the breweries are bringing something that maybe isn’t on tap all the time. Maybe it’s something that’s rare or only that season and so you really do get to sample a profile of local, regional, statewide beers and also national beers and some of the special things that they do.

Festival co-founders Tim Brady and Aaron Ludwig joined up with the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance five years ago to start the festival. For them it was a way to marry their love of craft beer with their love of downtown Harrisonburg. Brady said that from day one, they took a three-pronged approach:

BRADY: having the best beer we could possibly get, having absolutely incredible music and having really great food.

The festival is located in the Turner Pavilion in downtown Harrisonburg and has sold out every year it’s been held. Last year they progressed to holding the festival bi-yearly, but aren’t looking to grow the event itself, which is capped at 3000 tickets.

Brady said the pavilion is a finite space, but it’s part of the essence of the festival – namely a great community gathering in the heart of downtown Harrisonburg.

BRADY: The thing I’m always really proud of in which I kind of feel is a really good sign that we are doing a good job putting on a really high quality event is I love seeing the amount of kids that are at the event. We see kids every year that are anywhere from 2 to 12 and they are dancing and having a great time playing with hula hoops and really just having a great time with their parents nearby and to me that’s such a great sign that we’ve put on a well-run and safe event. If it was overly busy or if people were overly intoxicated or if something was really mismanaged then I don’t think we’d see parents bringing their kids. So as long as I see a bunch of kids dancing in front of a stage I know we’ve got a good event.

This year, there might be even more dancing than usual. In honor of the fifth anniversary of the festival

JENKINS: We decided we wanted to rock out a little bit … it’s going to get a little bit louder this year.

[Elephant Child music]

That’s Harrisonburg band Elephant Child. They along with J. Roddy Walston and the Business, heard earlier, and People’s Blues of Richmond are the music choices for this spring.

As excited as Jenkins is about the bands and beers lined up for Rocktown this year, what really makes the event special for him is the city itself and the people that live there. The festival is almost entirely sponsored by local businesses, including 3 Brothers Brewery, and Jack Brown’s. The latter is owned by festival co-founder Aaron Ludwig. Volunteers staff the festival. 

JENKINS: The richness of the experience is not just the great beers that we bring, it’s not just the great music that we bring, it’s the great people that live in Harrisonburg and come to…our downtown community. It really is celebration of who we are as a town, downtown, right now.

Kara Lofton is a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, VA. She is a 2014 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University and has been published by EMU, Sojourners Magazine, and The Mennonite. Her reporting for WMRA is her radio debut.