On a sweltering August afternoon at the Iowa State Fair, the longest lines often aren’t for pork chops on a stick or deep-fried novelties. Increasingly, fairgoers wind toward a different kind of Iowa staple: the Iowa Craft Beer Tent.
It has grown from an unlikely experiment to a feature that helped change how Iowans drink beer at the fair and far beyond it.
For Scott Carlson, longtime Des Moines restaurateur and brewer, the tent started as a simple idea to get better beer onto the fairgrounds. It opened on the Iowa State Fair’s Rock Island Avenue in 2011 with 36 beers on tap…