Tap & Craft brings a curated, small-scale beer festival to town

This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.

There’s a version of a beer festival that’s basically just a parking lot with wristbands and a vague sense of regret forming by hour two. You know the one. You’ve done the logistical math—lines vs. pours vs. whether you should have eaten more beforehand.

Tap & Craft is not that.

On Saturday, May 2, from 2 to 6 p.m., Tap & Craft lands at Iron Smoke Distillery in Fairport for a beer festival built on something closer to intention than volume. VIP (and the Tap Tier option) entry begins at 2 p.m., with general admission starting at 3 p.m. The whole thing wraps by 6 p.m.—a format that favors pacing over endurance.

The series started in Niagara Falls in 2022, with stops since at Buffalo RiverWorks, the Ithaca Farmers Market, and Hotel Canandaigua. The pattern isn’t about chasing the biggest markets. It’s about finding places where people are already primed for something better than “festival beer, but louder.” Each stop ends up shaped by its environment—the room, the crowd, and the way the event settles into the local rhythm instead of overriding it.

“We really like canal towns,” says Seth Piccirillo, Lock Tender owner and Tap & Craft founder. “We’re in Lockport and we’ve learned more and more about Fairport just being in a canal town. We know it’s a great community. We wanted to try something in Monroe County.

“I have family ties in Rochester, went to school there, and Iron Smoke is just a great smaller-scale venue to try this out in. It just all aligned.”

That choice matters. Iron Smoke Distillery isn’t a neutral container for events—it’s a space with its own internal logic. Steampunk lounge meets vaudeville throwback, billed as a “Watering Room & Side Show,” where things aren’t arranged in the most conventional order.

The details do real work here. On production days, a faint applewood smoke drifts out from the back. Lighting shifts depending on where you’re standing. Sound carries unevenly (in a good way—especially for live music). It’s the kind of place where a festival doesn’t “activate a venue” so much as temporarily joins an ongoing system that already has its own rules.

The crowd will follow suit. Fewer than 400 tickets are available across all sessions, keeping things intentionally small—no shoulder-to-shoulder lines, no scrambling to beat the next pour.

And then there’s the lineup.

Other Half. Finback. Mortalis. Hop Butcher for the World. 3 Sons. Imprint. Strangebird.

If you know, you know. If you don’t, this is the kind of roster that usually requires planning, patience, and at least one group text with the friend who travels for work and comes back with beer.

This isn’t a “what’s in distribution” list. It’s a “what’s worth building an event around” list—and that’s where One Stop comes in.

One Stop Brew Shop, owned by James Hilbert, has been around since 2012 and has quietly become one of the region’s more reliable tastemakers. Part boutique distributor (with a portfolio that stretches from Texas to Florida and into Ontario), part obsessively well-stocked bottle shop—and, if you’re paying attention, one of the better draft lists around—it operates on a simple idea: not everything, just the right things.

That approach has built trust. With customers, sure, but more importantly with breweries—the kind of trust that turns into access. Not because of scale or pressure, but because producers know their beer will be handled and presented the right way. That’s what shows up in a lineup like this.

“When I’ve worked with James at festivals, he always brought really exciting brands,” Piccirillo says. “One of the best parts of working at Lock Tender is getting to work with James and his team on all of the brands and specialty styles they can bring into the region. His partnership and the fit in Fairport was perfect for this.”

Across the full event, the list runs 20-plus producers and more than 60 pours spanning beer, cider, mead, and spirits. It’s structured less like a checklist and more like a drift—the kind of setup where you follow your curiosity instead of trying to “complete” the room.

VIP pours include Finback, Other Half, Mortalis, 3 Sons, Imprint, Talking Cursive, Arkane, Badlands, Magnanimous, Tin Barn, and Strangebird.

The Tap Tier ticket includes two 16 oz. cans of Blacksmiths of Olympus, a hazy triple IPA brewed by Mortalis in collaboration with One Stop and the Lock Tender specifically for the event. Not a branded festival throwaway—an actual collaboration built for the day, with the people behind it in the room when it’s poured.

“I am just really excited about the brands,” Piccirillo says. “It’s got some of our favorites and some new ones. It’s a really solid list.”

The Far Trio plays live. Artisan vendors are spread throughout the space. There are pretzel necklaces, because even the more self-aware beer festivals understand that some traditions are worth keeping.

Not every beer festival needs to reinvent itself. But the good ones tend to make a few deliberate choices—about scale, about setting, about who’s pouring—and let those decisions do the work.

This is one of those.

Tickets are $50 for general admission, $65 for VIP, $75 for the Tap Tier (which includes the cans and the necklace), and $12 for designated drivers. You can buy online at tapandcraft.com or in person at One Stop Brew Shop on Ridgeway Avenue in Greece.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.

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