Game on!
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Ed Fritz MiBrew Trail
“Burning Foot gives us a chance to show off the Michigan brewing community’s sense of family and how breweries have each other’s’ backs to work collaboratively.”
As Muskegon, the state of Michigan and the rest of the country moves forward with life postCOVID, the folks at the Lakeshore Brewers Guild are moving quickly to do their part. The 2021 Burning Foot Beer Festival started selling tickets on June 12 for their Aug. 28 event on Muskegon’s expansive Pere Marquette Beach. The popular festival will be back after a one-year hiatus due to the pandemic. Burning Foot bills itself as Michigan’s only barefoot beer festival on the beach. “Obviously, it has been a very difficult year for the guild and its members. We’re anxious to get back on the beach and to see our customers,” said Allen Serio, the co-founder of Burning Foot and Lakeshore Brewers Guild member.
BURNING FOOT BEER FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 2021 FESTIVITIES
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Serio and co-founder Jim Hegedus made the tough call last year to cancel the event and even tougher call early this year to move forward so they were ready if the pandemic protocols allowed. In 2014, the event was born out of a sense of deep community pride for Muskegon natives Allen Serio
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and Jim Hegedus. Muskegon’s brewery scene was in its infancy. Pigeon Hill Brewing and Unruly Brewing were both getting ready to open new operations. “We thought it would be so cool to give people outside of Muskegon a chance to experience our beach and a Lake Michigan sunset,” Serio said, making reference
to the festival’s location and hours into the evening. The inaugural event took place in the summer of 2015. The festival itself is built in a circle to give attendees a 360-degree view of Pere Marquette’s beauty and atmosphere. “This is so much more than a beer festival on the beach,” says Serio, who also is the owner of Wonderland Distilling Company in Muskegon. Serio cited an example of an issue
a couple of years ago when one brewery from the east side of the state had unexpected staffing issues at the last minute and was going to have to pull out of the event. Quickly another brewer, who was in the area, pulled together some staff of their own to come over to the event and run their taps so that the show could go on. In past years, Burning Foot has featured more than 80 breweries from around Michigan and other
MI Brew Trail | Summer 2021
