The Morris Beer Festival may have had its biggest draw yet Saturday, despite a general downturn in the beer business but thanks to local enthusiasm for craft beer and good weather.

The annual beer celebration now doubles as an Oktoberfest since organizers had their fill of the dog days of August.

That happened after the beer festival withered one year under 108 degree temperatures under its previous August schedule, said Festival Director Aren Hansen.

“That year we decided no more Augusts,” Hansen said.

The change in time and temperature appeared to be appreciated Saturday by Beer Festival attendees, who numbered over 600 two hours into the event.

“Love it,” Tierney Morrison of Morris said. “The weather is perfect. It’s a great location. The band is very good.”

The event also has been moved from the Grundy County Fairgrounds to Goold Park, where shady trees and a band stage contribute to the Oktoberfest theme.

Hansen has been bringing craft beers to his Honest Abe’s Tap & Grill since 2014. In 2016, he launched the Morris Beer Festival to celebrate craft beers in Grundy County.

“We were one of the first craft beer vendors when we opened,” Hansen said. “Now, everyone carries craft.”

Hansen built relationships with craft beer brewers and distributors that made it possible to hold a beer festival in Morris.

“We’ve got over 100 beers here to sample,” he said at the festival on Saturday.

Those beers come from a range of purveyors that included Keg Grove Brewing Company, which has its own brew house in Morris, and Blue Ribbon Products, a Joliet distributor that counts craft beers as a significant portion of its beer distribution business.

Keg Grove originated in Bloomington in 2018 and opened a second location in Morris in 2024.

The craft beer business has been “good for us,” said Brian Scott with Keg Grove.

Scott noted that Keg Grove’s Holey Jeans blueberry wheat beer won the People’s Choice Award for Best Beer at the Illinois State Fair this summer.

Keg Grove is the only brewpub in Morris.

But there is another brewer, Nuclear Brewing, operated by two former employees of the La Salle nuclear power plant.

“He’s an engineer, and I’m a chemist,” Marc McNames said of he and business partner Matt Cosenza.

Not commercial brewers yet, McNames and Cosenza are able to introduce their beers at the Morris Beer Festival.

“It gets the public interested in what we’re doing,” McNames said. “We get our names out there.”

Nuclear Brewing was one of 47 brewers represented at the festival.

Eight of them were represented by Blue Ribbon Products, which counts craft beers at about 10% of its business.

“We try to bring something that appeals to everybody,” said Adam Smith, brand manager for Blue Ribbon Products.

Smith said the beer business has become more challenging, including the craft beer business, amidst a trend that includes a decline in beer drinking.

According to the Brewers Association, a trade group for independent craft brewers, craft beer sales numbers in 2024 were mixed. But craft beer accounts for nearly 25% of the $117 billion U.S. beer market, which is down 1% from 2024.

Craft beer enthusiasts include Erik and Erica Schelling of Naperville, who were among those at the Morris Beer Festival.

“One of the things we like to do on weekends is go hopping from brewer to brewer,” Schelling said.

The Morris festival provided a compact format for that activity.

“It’s been a great event,” Schelling said.

The Schellings represented a significant segment of the attendees for the Morris Beer Festival, many of whom come from outside Grundy County.

Grundy County represent the largest group of attendees, Hansen said.

“Our second-largest group, to my surprise,” he said, “is people from Chicago.”

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