Parkville Microfest Goes Mobile

Beer festival season officially kicks off this weekend with the 9th Annual Parkville Microbrew Festival taking place on Saturday, April 21st at 1 pm. The organizers of the festival have kicked things up a notch this year, though, and have developed a mobile site that will allow attendees to access information on the breweries and beers being poured "on the go".

Visiting m.parkvillemicrofest.com from your phone will take you to the new site. You can search breweries by name (the barrel icon) or you can even search by beer style (the magnifying glass icon) in order to find out what specific beers will be sampled during the event. Clicking into a specific beer allows you to rate it and even tweet about it (see screenshot below). There are also tabs with information the bands that will be playing, plus the history of Parkville and the Microbrew Festival. Though it soft launched last night, they will be updating the site nightly for the rest of the week and on the day of the event, so continue checking back to see what's added and what great beers you'll have the opportunity to try.


Personally, I think this is a fantastic addition and I hope other local festivals will follow suit and develop mobile websites/apps with their beer list information. I personally am not a fan of carrying around a sheet or booklet at festivals. And since I will probably have my phone out most of the time anyway (Untappd, anyone?), it's especially convenient to be able to access the brewery/beer list that way.

You may also notice in the screenshot below that the festival is promoting a Twitter hashtag, #Pvmicrofest, for the event. Again, with the rapidly growing presence and use of social media in the craft beer community, it makes sense to do this, and will be a fun way for festival-goers to interact during the event (and review what happened after, in case things get a little hazy for some of us).

So bookmark m.parkvillemicrofest.com and make sure to have your phone battery fully charged on Saturday. Chances are, there's going to be a whole lot of drinking, browsing, checking in and tweeting going on!

Mobile Site Homepage

Brewery Page


Beer detail page


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