Island Hop Craft Beer Festival

Island Hop is downtown Fernandina Beach's craft beer festival, held annually in the autumn.

What it is

A ticketed tasting festival: you buy admission, you get a glass, and you work through pours from a list of breweries — regional Florida and Georgia producers alongside others from further afield.

That is a different animal from the island's street festivals. The Shrimp Festival and Dickens on Centre are free-to-walk events with the streets closed; this is a bounded event with a ticket and a session time.

Why October

Autumn is the island's best weather window. The summer heat and the near-daily afternoon thunderstorms have eased, the water is still warm from August, and the spring crowds are gone. Standing outdoors drinking beer in Fernandina Beach in October is a considerably better idea than doing it in July.

October also brings the Amelia Island Jazz Festival, so the two can be paired if the dates cooperate.

Practicalities, and the important one

Buy tickets ahead. Tasting festivals cap attendance, and the good sessions go first.

Plan how you are getting home before you start. This is the practical point that matters most about this particular event. Ride-share coverage on Amelia Island is thinner than in a city, and a festival evening concentrates demand at exactly the moment everyone wants a car.

If you are staying downtown or oceanside, you walk or take a very short ride. If you are staying at a south-end resort, that is a fifteen-minute drive and you need to have solved it in advance. For this event in particular, staying downtown is worth the premium.

Eat. Downtown has twenty-plus kitchens inside eight blocks and you will want one of them. Book if it is a Friday or Saturday.

The island's other local drinks

Worth knowing about outside festival week: there is brewing on the island — Mocama Beer Company, which sponsors our sister site, a disclosure we make on its own listing — and small-scale distilling downtown at Marlin & Barrel. Together they make a short and genuinely local drinks tour possible.

Taproom hours are shorter than bar hours and often exclude days a restaurant would be open, so check before you go.

Dates, tickets and the brewery list

All set annually by the organisers, and we have not confirmed the current year's. Check the festival's own information before booking travel or accommodation around it.

We publish no dates, ticket prices or brewery lists we have not verified. See our editorial policy.

What else to do that week

October is right for everything the island does well: Fort Clinch without summer heat on the ramparts, the Egans Creek Greenway at first light with alligators visible from the trail, a kayak trip into the marsh, and the beach at Peters Point or the state park with room to spread out.

And sunset over the shrimp docks at the bottom of Centre Street — the island faces east, so the river side downtown is where the end of the day happens.