Kraft Fest, the international craft beer festival, takes place at Dorćol Platz in Belgrade on October 31 from 6pm. This year over seventy breweries are announced, and the ticket includes the tasting.

Dorćol Platz at Dobračina 59b is a former factory turned cultural space, and it has hosted this edition for several years now. The format is simple: small independent breweries from Serbia and abroad gather in one yard, each with its own bar, and the visitor works their way from table to table. What separates it from a beer festival in the classic sense is that the producers are there in person, so the question "what is this?" gets answered by the person who brewed it.

Over the last decade the Serbian craft scene has grown from a handful of enthusiasts into an industry with its own association of small independent brewers. One of the earlier editions was tied to a project on new hop varieties, run with the association and the company Hopseeker, which also covered wild hop strains that had cross-bred on their own across the fields of Bačka, where hops were once grown commercially. That detail says the story is not only about imported recipes.

The Macedonian craft scene is incomparably smaller and most of these names never reach shelves back home. For someone in Skopje who follows this category, seventy breweries in one yard is a shorter route to flavours that otherwise have to be hunted down one specialist shop at a time.

Tickets through tickets.rs start at 2,600 dinars, roughly 1,370 denars, tasting included. The event starts at 6pm and runs late into the night, on a day when Belgrade is packed anyway.