Brewed Arts Festival returns to Cherokee Street this weekend

This Saturday marks the third annual Brewed Arts Festival, a grassroots event that emphasizes the intersection between beer and the arts. The third iteration of the festival will feature more than 25 types of beer and other beverages for attendees to try, while also emphasizing the rich art scene and history that runs through Cherokee Street. This year’s fest will include more than 30 artist pop-ups, live paintings, and five DJ sets to complement the brewery tastings. 

According to Emily Thenhaus, director of Cherokee Street’s Community Improvement District, The Brewed Arts Festival was the brainchild of Justin Harris at St. Louis Hop Shop and the Screwed Arts Collective—an arts collective of many well-known artists in St. Louis located on Cherokee Street. 

“Justin, especially having run beer festivals in the past, really wanted to create a beer festival on Cherokee Street that also celebrated the Cherokee Street culture, the art scene here, local artists, and the intersection between beer and the creative community,” Thenhaus says.

First launched in 2022, the Brewed Arts Festival lines Cherokee Street with a mile of beer and art vendors. The festival is a day-long event featuring unique brews and complimentary beer tasting glasses with the purchase of a ticket. 

“There’s a lot of different cultures and industries represented on Cherokee and in a lot of our small commercial districts, and it’s easy to overlook the ways that those different industries and different complex subcultures relate to each other and benefit each other,” Thenhaus says. “Some people see Cherokee Street only as a bar strip, or only see it for the tacos, or only see it for the creative graffiti murals, and really, I think it’s the ways that all of these things interact with each other and work together that makes Cherokee Street the place that it is.”

The festival is made possible by the Cherokee Street Foundation, the nonprofit wing of Cherokee’s Community Improvement District. Alongside the Brewed Arts Festival, the foundation presents the Cinco de Mayo Festival, the Print Bazaar, and the Jazz Crawl, with the ultimate goal of creating exciting opportunities to bring visitors from the larger St. Louis area to Cherokee Street to appreciate the rich culture and support local businesses. 

“[Cherokee Street’s Community Improvement District’s] sole mission is to bring Cherokee alive through one-of-a-kind events like this,” Thenhaus says. “The Brewed Arts Festival is a beer event, it’s an art event, and it’s an economic development event for our little slice of pie down here in South City.”