ATLANTA — As summer draws to a close here in the metro Atlanta area, nearly every major event has been postponed until the fall or flat-out canceled — with one exception.
The Grant Park Annual Summer Shade Festival or in this case the "un-Festival."
Normally held in late August, this two-day festival was founded by the Grant Park Conversancy (GPC). For nearly 20 years, it served as another method to help raise funds for the non-profit whose purpose is to provide renovation, beautification, and restoration of the city’s oldest public park.
When the members of the GPC committee started to realize that COVID-19 wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, alternative plans started to be discussed. While canceling the festival would have been the simplest choice, the annual Summer Shade Festival is not only the park’s largest festival, it also accounts for nearly one-third of the GPC’s operating budget. So, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the committee decided to get creative.
Director of Operations for the Grant Park Conversancy, Alisa Chambers, told My East Atlanta News that once the decision was made not to cancel the Summer Shade Festival, the committee got on board with finding innovative alternatives to keystones of the festival; food, music & art accessible and, most importantly free, to the residents and patrons.
“The Summer Shade Festival brings in about a third of our annual operating funds and so it's extremely important for us to host an event every summer,” Chambers stressed. “Plus, it's just a wonderful community event that everybody in the neighborhood is excited for and we get people coming from all over.”
Enter Grant Park’s favorite brewery, Eventide Brewing.
The neighborhood staple, located at 1015 Grant St. SE, had the ideal outdoor space to accommodate a modest meet-up, while still allowing for more-than-sufficient room for social distancing.
In addition to providing a safe and familiar place for the community to interact, the folks at GPC and Eventide put their heads together and came up with the idea of creating a signature brew just for the occasion.
The Summer Shade Pale Ale was born. This special edition was selected by none other than the community itself, compiled from feedback gathered through a public survey taken by Grant Park residents, settling on a clean, crisp American Pale Ale brew that embodies citrus and tropical notes and includes flavors like orange, grapefruit, mango, papaya, stone fruit, and others to create the perfect companion for arguably the final community shindig of the summer.
A portion of the proceeds from the Summer Shade special edition will go directly to the GPC.
“They approached us about the possibility of doing a collaboration beer, with some of the proceeds going to the Conservancy, and to see if we can maybe do something on-site just to promote the fact that we're doing a virtual festival this year,” said Eventide founder and co-owner, Geoffrey Williams.
The GPC also set-up a virtual artist market, in order to still showcase local artisans and makers, as well as a page called food partners, to inform and encourage residents to patronize local businesses that have supported Summer Shade in the past.
Local pop-up restaurant, Shamiso Foods was onsite to provide patrons with their signature mix of West African, Italian, and French cuisine.
Those residents who may have missed out on the un-Festival can still purchase fundraising items from our online store such as:
- T-shirts & Tank Tops designed by EAV artist extraordinaire, R. Land
- Eventide Brewing Summer Shade Pale Ale (while supplies last)
For more information on the Grant Park Summer Shade unFestival, please visit their website, and for more information on Eventide Brewing, click here.
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