Dreamville may not officially kick off until this weekend, but things in Raleigh, North Carolina are already popping off. Leading up to what will be the final year of the festival, several pop-ups and exclusive events are being hosted throughout the city that are notable not just because they are great places to pre-game before the weekend, but because they allow for early access to one of Dreamville’s best pieces of merch — the Festival Brew.
What’s better than merch from the last Dreamville Fest ever? Merch that you can drink!
For every year that Dreamville has been a thing, it has been a tradition that the festival sell a hyper-exclusive small-batch locally crafted beer. The brew serves as both a collectible and a totem of North Carolina pride. Dreamville has always been a festival with deep connections to the state (J. Cole is a Fayetteville native) and the festival brew, with its collaboration with local brewers like R&D Brewing, Foothills Brewing, and this year, HAZE, is the perfect icon of homegrown craft.
We spoke with Adrian Larrea, a longtime Raleigh resident, beverage entrepreneur, and one of the creative forces behind Dreamville’s Fest Brew to talk about the origins of the tradition, the inspiration behind this year’s brew, (spoiler: it’s a Strawberry Lemonade Shandy), and what the future holds as Dreamville comes to a close.
So how did the Dreamville Festival Brew become an annual thing?
I first met Adam Roy, one of the founders of the festival, through some mutual friends in Downtown Raleigh. In 2018, when they were going to run the very first Dreamville, Adam reached out to me because he knew I was in beverage, and asked, “Hey, what could we do that is cool, different, and unique for the festival?”
That year I was running a kombucha company at the time. We had made Kombucha Pale Ale as a trial thing to see how people liked it. I had a big batch of it that was going to be getting done right around the time of Dreamville, so I said, “Well, what if we did some custom Dreamville cans and we did a custom beer for you guys?”
So we built the first can design, it had the date and everything, then that festival got canceled because of a hurricane, and so we had to drink a lot of those beers. The rest of them got scrapped. We couldn’t reuse them because it was the only year that we put the specific date on the can. We learned our lesson after that. Don’t ever put the specific date on your event can!
When that festival got moved to 2019, Adam hit me up again and asked me, “Hey, are we running back The Fest Brew?” And I was like, “Let’s do it.”
And so we did a Kombucha Pale Ale. They hit all the concession stands in the beer tent and all of them were gone before it got dark. Everybody got in line for it. It was a piece of merch, it was a piece of history. It was a really cool beer that you could only try that one day. And so it sold out, crazy, crazy fast.
The next year we were going to have the festival and then COVID happened, so we got delayed.
So in 2022 we did another brew and it kind of turned into a thing for Adam and I. We came up with all of these different concepts just to have fun with it, and it started to turn into: what’s the branding going to be of the festival this year? How do we tie in the stage names? How do we get artists to promote it? It started to be really fun. That year EARTHGANG actually took a picture with one of the cans and he posted it.
When did it feel like the festival brew program was really becoming a phenomenon?
The third Dreamville we partnered with R&D Brewing in Raleigh and they made an orange creamsicle flavor. It was so delicious and everybody just loved it so much. That year people started posting that they were drinking these beers on the beer drink review sites. And we also threw an intro party with R&D where we had a DJ come and spin, and we posted it out there as a release party and all these Dreamville fans from all over the country, all over the world started showing up for that party and people were coming to us and they’re like, “Hey, just to let you know, we’ve been collecting the brews for the last couple of years. We go to a lot of different festivals and nobody has this kind of program and we just think it’s so cool, please keep doing it.”
It really hit for us that people were really following the program and what we were doing. That year we started tying in some local bars and some local bottle shops, and there were some pre festival events and the festival had moved to the two-day model. Last year we did the Rise and Shine Ale, which was our attempt at a dark and stormy liquor drink. It had vanilla and lime and it was a little bit darker than anything that we had done before. Super funky and different and a little bit almost beer snobbish. We went really in that direction and again, people showed up.
Can you take us into this year’s Strawberry Lemonade Shandy?
When news came out that this was going to be the fifth and final Dreamville, Adam and I, we got together and we decided what we wanted to do.
I had started a new beverage brand called HAZE. We are a THC infused soda and energy drink company out of North Carolina. We were originally thinking how cool it would be to do a THC drink for the festival, but we decided to just keep this a beer program since we had done it for four years and this was going to be the final. But we had a flavor from our company, Lifted Lemonade. It’s like this strawberry lemonade flavor.
And we were like, “Well, what if we did a strawberry lemonade Shandy?” It was light, it was bright, it had an influenced by HAZE type vibe to it, but not a THC drink, just normal beer. We partnered with Foothills Brewing Company, these guys have been known for 25 years in North Carolina. They’re in Winston-Salem. So we started taking flavors from HAZE and different beer styles that Foothills knew how to make, and we were blending it all together trying to figure out how to make a funky lemon shandy.
And we nailed it.
And so it’s really cool to see everything coming together for this fifth and final year. And this year we’re actually going to have them at the pop-up, which is this really cool merch program that they do with special exclusive merch.
But the excitement is there, people are already asking for it by name. People are calling it “Fest Brew.” We actually trademarked “Fest Brew” because we thought that this is something that maybe we could work with other festivals to do or figure out a way to take this concept even further. But our roots will always be with Dreamville. That’s what Dreamville is all about about. It’s about figuring things out. It’s about discovering things.
The Dreamers and Dreamville brand that they’ve built, all the artists that they bring in every year that are part of the Dreamville label, it’s all just so cohesive and it’s so well done. The brand is all intertwined into everything. The artists are all intertwined, the drinks are intertwined, the merch is all intertwined. It’s a big incredible story and adventure.
When did you come up with the idea to make a new brew for every festival?
We wanted to do something different every year. But a Kombucha Pale Ale or Kombucha Sour, nobody had even heard of that. So we didn’t even know how it was going to be received, but it just sparked the creative experimental vibe, and I think that that’s what we’ve carried through for the five years, asking “how do we be experimental and how do we be different and how do we make sure we bring the brand and that year’s branding into the fold every year while also keeping it North Carolina?”
How important was keeping the production process local?
J. Cole is from Fayetteville, and we all have family and friends that’s spread out through North Carolina. It just so happened that we could keep things in Raleigh for years because Raleigh has so much going on. It has so many different breweries and so many different groups to work with. The focus with the program was how do we keep everything North Carolina, how do we keep ingredients North Carolina? How do we do everything that we possibly can in North Carolina?
That’s a absolutely huge part of it because people come to this festival to know what is happening in Raleigh. The amount of economic growth and support that Dreamville brings to Raleigh and the Greater Triangle and to North Carolina every year with people flying in from all over the world to come here, spend money here, support our businesses and our bars and our breweries and our restaurants and our clubs and our hotels and everything, it makes a huge economic impact.
So it was a really big part of the program.
This might be a tough question for you, but do you have a personal favorite festival brew?
The one that resonates as being the most true to my heart was the first year that we did it, because it was just so new and it was so different. It was super experimental. Then I’d say second favorite year is probably this year. Bringing HAZE into the mix is kind of like a dream come true. To be able to tie my brand in, how big Dreamville’s gotten, and for it to all be connected together is just beautiful.
And then my third favorite would be the Dreamsicle Orange Cream. We just nailed it so well. It was like a sun-kissed root beer float with vanilla ice cream. It was just so balanced and delicious. So I’d say those are my favorite three. But I actually just tasted this beer for the first time since it had been packaged and I mean, it’s really good. So people are going to really, really enjoy it this year.
Because the brews have kind of a cult following and this is the last Dreamville, are there any plans to do a collector’s edition of all five or offer them outside of the festival? Or are these just forever locked to Dreamville?
They are locked to Dreamville, but “Fest Brew” as a concept might not be locked to Dreamville. We would love to figure out a way to work with other festivals to be able to create cool custom programs. It adds such a vibe and it’s such a cool thing and has the potential to create a cult following that it would be silly to just let it go. But if it does and it was just this five year run, I’m really happy that I got to be a part of it.
What’s the game plan going to Dreamville this year? What do you suggest we do first and how many Strawberry Lemonade Shandys are we drinking?
Well, it depends if you’re just going to the two-day festival or if you’re coming for all the events. Because the pop-up shop started Wednesday in Downtown Raleigh, and then Friday is a whole day of events. We’re going to be at the CAM center.
How many you drink is on you, but I think that over the course of the whole festival, everybody’s going to be drinking three, four, five, six of them or at least until they run out. That’s one thing everybody needs to keep in mind: if everybody goes absolutely HAM for them in the first day of the festival, there might not be any left for the second day!
