The last weekend of September 2015 was a busy one for crowds in southeastern Pennsylvania. Pope Francis celebrated Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia that Sunday, and hundreds of thousands of people lined the route. Seventy miles west, a smaller crowd lined East Main Street in Lititz for the second Lititz Craft Beer Fest.
The festival, staged again by the Lititz chapter of AMBUCS, had grown quickly from its first year. Where the 2014 event featured 47 breweries, the 2015 edition listed 57 brewers pouring more than 120 beers. Some of the names on the taps fit the weekend’s mood: Jack’s Abby offered a lager called Mass Rising, and The Lost Abbey poured a beer named Judgment Day.
What drinkers favored
Festival-goers that year gravitated toward bold flavors. A habanero mango IPA from ZeroDay Brewing Company of Harrisburg was among the most talked-about beers on the street, with drinkers describing fruit up front and heat in the finish. The trend matched what was happening nationally, as brewers experimented with fruit, spice and barrel aging to stand out in crowded taprooms.
Pennsylvania breweries made up much of the lineup, alongside out-of-state brewers using the festival to reach central Pennsylvania drinkers. For many small brewers, a festival pour is one of the few ways to put a new beer in front of hundreds of people in a single afternoon.
A beer you could only get in Lititz
Some pours were made for the occasion. Great Lakes Brewing brought a version of its Edmund Fitzgerald porter made with locally sourced chocolate from the Wilbur Chocolate factory and coffee from Lititz’s Whiff Roasters, available only at the Lititz festival. It was a fitting tribute in a town whose identity was still tied to the chocolate plant on North Broad Street, which would close a few months later, in January 2016.
ZeroDay itself was a reminder of what the home brew tent could lead to. The Harrisburg brewery’s founders had found early success in this kind of competition before going professional, and the festival’s beer writers described the home brew finalists as the brewers of tomorrow.
Home brewers in the mix
The home brew competition returned for the second year, and it drew experienced hobbyists as well as first-timers. Several attendees said they had come on the recommendation of friends who had entered or placed in the contest the year before, which says a good deal about how festivals spread by word of mouth among brewers.
What the festival meant for downtown
Events like this one bring people to Lititz who might not otherwise come on a Sunday. Restaurants and shops along Main and Broad streets often see strong traffic on festival days, and visitors who come for one event tend to return for others, such as the Fire & Ice Festival in February or the Chocolate Walk in the fall.
The festival model also spreads benefit around. Volunteers run the gate and pour lines, breweries get exposure, and the money raised supports a cause. For AMBUCS, that cause is mobility: the organization’s AmTryke program provides adaptive tricycles for children and adults with disabilities.
Planning a festival day in Lititz
Lititz is compact, and most downtown events can be reached on foot once you are parked. A few tips:
- Public lots fill early on festival days. Lititz Borough uses ParkMobile for paid street parking on parts of East Main and Broad streets, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
- Lititz Springs Park, at the center of town, is a good meeting point and has benches and shade.
- Many downtown restaurants take reservations on busy weekends; book ahead if you want a sit-down meal.
For how the festival began, read our account of the first Lititz Craft Beer Fest. For upcoming events, see Things To Do.