Below is a post from a previous travel blog I wrote in 2011. In 2010, I visited Serbia for the first time, and went to my first Belgrade Beer Festival. There was no craft beer at the festival, and (technically) none in Serbia.

Now it’s 2019, and I live in Serbia. There is plenty of craft beer to drink both at the festival and in Serbia. Things have changed.

……

The Belgrade Beer Festival is not a beer festival. That’s what every beer geek back in the USA would say.  

In short, out of the 20 or so beers available at the festival, there’s nothing that would excite any major beer tourist.  Unfortunately, once you go east of Germany and the Czech Republic, all of the European beers start tasting the same.  

If you want to be the first to say you’ve drank Jelen, LAV, Niksicko, and some Irish-Style Serbian Craft-ish Beer, then go for bragging rights.  They’re still better than your average Central American beer, where I live, but there’s no Serbian craft beer that will make beer geeks have beergasms.

Belgrade Beer Festival 2010

First, you don’t go to the city of Belgrade for beer tasting. You go there to party. Hell, as much as I disagree with Lonely Planet, they were right to award Belgrade the “Number One Party City in The World 2010.”

And the Belgrade Beer Festival is certainly a great place to party. There’s one massive stage that has live bands playing until the early hours of the morning. There’s a “fun zone” and “food zones.” You have four days of the week to join the millions of people passing through the gates for the fest.

Beer, alcohol and Serbian barbecue flow freely from the stands.  Beautiful Balkan girls will dance with you. Crazy Balkan guys will challenge you, the foreigner, to drink more than them.

Good luck with that.

This Ain’t Exit Festival

Unlike Serbia’s far more popular Exit Festival, the Belgrade Beer Festival still feels authentically Serbian. Most of the bands are national or former Yugoslavian rock acts that don’t play outside of the Balkan region. Contrarily, Exit Festival attracts Europeans from all over to see international bands and DJs such as Guns ‘N’ Roses, Snoop Dogg, Eric Prydz, Arctic Monkeys and David Guetta.

During my two days at the Belgrade Beer Festival, I didn’t run into a single ‘foreigner.’

The big headliners for the Belgrade Beer Festival 2010 were Riblja Čorba, Atomsko Sklonište, Kiki Lesendrić i Piloti and Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg (yes, from The Ramones.)  And for those who fondly remember the 1980s, Simple Minds also headlined.  One group which has never headlined, but which has played every festival dating back to the first in 2003, is the Orthodox Celts.  They are actually a national Serbian group, but true to their name, they play traditional Irish folk music.  They rock.

Do most of these groups ring a bell?

Serbian Rock And Roll And More

From a local perspective, Riblja Čorba is probably the most famous of all the groups.  These old guys have managed to stay rocking since 1978 with most of the original band still intact.  I’m told their lyrics are quite funny and often political. If only I understood Serbian language.

In addition to rock ‘n’ roll groups, the festival offers more typical traditional Serbian music for people who are into the Gypsy Balkan sound made popular through Goran Bregovic, Emir Kusterica and the like.  As cool as that music is, some Serbs will tell you that Goran and Emir ‘sold out.’  

Go to the Belgrade Beer Festival anyway if you want to hear some undiscovered sounds…

My personal recommendation: buy a few liters of Jelen Pivo outside the festival. It’s a lot cheaper and you can get drunk before you go in.  Most of the Serbs will be doing the same and – as with me – they might ask you, “Stranger, why the fuck you here, and not Exit Fest?!” 

Then they will hand you a beer and say, “Ziveli!” You’ll be in good company. I certainly was.