Magic City Brewfest Returns For Its Fifth Year
It’s the time of year that Birmingham has been waiting for all year, the unofficial start of summer…Magic City Brewfest! Free the Hops is back for our 5th year of the festival and we couldn’t be more excited.
MCBF will be June 3rd and 4th at Sloss Furnaces in downtown Birmingham. The Friday session will be from 7:00 – 11:00 PM and the Saturday session from 4:00 – 8:00 PM. Last year over 5,000 people attended both sessions.
The brewfests are our number one source of funding for our mission of changing Alabama’s beer laws and every little bit helps. We have succeeded with raising the ABV which brought many new breweries and beers into the state. The law change has also benefited many local businesses which are now carrying craft beer. In 2011, FTH is pushing two new bills in the Alabama legislature:
- The Brewery Modernization Act seeks to remove archaic restrictions that prevent Alabama breweries from operating tap rooms, to remove hurdles that make it difficult to open brewpubs in our state, and to allow brewpubs to sell their beer to other retailers.
- The Gourmet Bottle Bill seeks to raise the maximum package size allowed for the sale of beer. Right now, you won’t find any beer sold in a bottle larger than 16 ounces, but hundreds of craft beers are packaged only in 22 ounce or 750 milliliter bottles.
We are planning on having around 200 individual beers at the MCBF including many never before seen in Alabama not to mention some specialty casks from breweries. A big change to the MCBF this year is that FTH is buying beer for the festival rather than requesting donated beer. This will give us more freedom to have the exact beers we want at the festival which is something we are happy about. We want MCBF to be the best beer festival in the southeast and we’re working every year to get better and better. This is the next step in that evolution. If you have any specialty or one-off beers that you would like to feature please let me know if you haven’t already.
