JellyFish and Craft Beer Festival Kick-Off Labour Day Weekend in OC
OCEAN CITY, MD- Ocean City’s 2nd annual Jellyfish festival kicked on at 12 pm Saturday on North Division Street.
The venue featured a stage, and a beachfront audience area, where concertgoers could purchase bracelets to be part of the Shore Craft on the Beach Festival.
Local band Chasing Straights was one of the first bands to perform at the event, at the 12 pm time slot.
Their lead vocalist Sam Capolongo told 47abc that the event was a great way for his band to perform in front of a live venue, something that has been a challenge over the past year for artists.
He said at first people didn’t realize a concert was happening, but when his group took the stage people began to gather and join in on the festivities.
“We didn’t really know what to expect coming here and to see people on the beach not really knowing what’s going on seeing a live band happen then come up to the stage and see what we had to play for them for our 30 minutes was really cool,’ Capolongo said.
The concert venue itself is free to enter, but as part of the Craft Beer festival, different bracelets were available upon the entrance to the beach that allowed for a different amount of beverages to be purchased from the different local craft brewer stands on the beach including EVO Brewery and DogFishHead.
Craft Beer Festival Organizer and Shore Craft Beer CEO Ann Hillyer said the two events were natural fits for each other and credits LiveWireMedia’s Brad Hoffman for approaching them with the space.
She says over 17 different local breweries were part of the event, and that having a large audience get exposure to the breweries through their pop-up stands can help build customer interest and drive traffic to their brick and mortar locations.
“That’s super exciting for these little breweries because when they come here they taste the beers, they use the shore beer app to find them and they can go and visit those breweries later,” she said.
Hillyer said the event had sold tickets for nearly 4,000 brewers but with walks up also joining the event she says nearly 8,000 people had made it to both festivals.
