Evil Genius is turning 15, and the Fishtown brewery is marking it by taking over a full city block. The Evil Genius 15th Anniversary Music Festival runs Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., stretching from Cecil B. Moore to Palmer on Front Street and over to Blair on Palmer itself. It’s free, all-ages, and dog-friendly, with food and drink pay-as-you-go.
The headliner is Wheatus — the band still best known for a song about being an outsider that came out 25 years ago. That pairing tracks: Evil Genius has built its identity on “Very Silly Names for Very Serious Beers” since it opened in 2011, and there’s no cleaner way to mark 15 years of leaning into nostalgia than handing the closing set to the band behind “Teenage Dirtbag.”
Evil Genius 15th Anniversary Music Festival Is Built Around Wheatus and Nostalgia
Wheatus, fronted by singer and guitarist Brendan Brown, plays from 8 to 10 p.m. to close the night. “Teenage Dirtbag” found a second life through a viral TikTok movement in 2022 and cracked international top-40 charts again in 2023, and the band arrives in Fishtown fresh off an international tour built around the song’s 25th anniversary.
Singer-songwriter Disterbenz, who plays earlier in the evening, has a direct line to that same story — she’s a longtime touring partner of Wheatus and has done backup vocal stints on The Tonight Show, Late Night With Seth Meyers, and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
The rest of the day builds toward that closer with a mostly local lineup: Kat Rivers & The Second Sight, WMMR’s July Local Shots Band of the Month, opens at noon, followed by two sets from 2000s emo-and-alt-rock outfit Tell All Your Friends, Bethlehem shoegaze act Luna Pools, and Philadelphia’s Madska.
every7years, currently recording its debut full-length with Grammy-nominated producer Matt Squire, plays the 6 p.m. slot before Disterbenz and Wheatus close the night. “This festival is a massive thank you to our community, our fans, and the neighborhood,” said Evil Genius co-founder Trevor Hayward.
Two Anniversary Beers Anchor the Evil Genius 15th Anniversary Music Festival
The festival is also the release date for two beers built for the occasion. Get In My Belly, an 11% ABV barleywine, is the stranger of the two: one batch was split three years ago, with half resting in a maple syrup barrel and half in a hot sauce barrel, before the brewers blended them back together into something sweet and spicy at once. It’s available on tap and in 500ml bottles.
Look at This Photograph pours exclusively on draft October 3 — a 6.5% IPA built from 15 different hop varieties, including Citra, Simcoe, Galaxy, and Nectaron, and conditioned on actual birthday cake. Evil Genius describes a lush, pillowy mouthfeel carrying tropical fruit and bright citrus against a cake-batter sweetness underneath.
Fishtown Fills In Around the Evil Genius 15th Anniversary Music Festival
Around the Evil Genius 15th Anniversary Music Festival, neighborhood restaurants take over the food side: LMNO, the Fishtown taqueria known for its patio and its margaritas, runs an outdoor taco bar, and Mecha Noodle Bar serves hand rolls and sake alongside the festival’s own beer list — a bigger version of the food-and-drink mix that showed up at Evil Genius’s spring Block Party earlier this year.
An outdoor market rounds things out with nearly 50 local vendors, artists, and makers, including Mohr Does Art’s painted pet portraits, Venus Invictus’s mythology-inspired perfumes, and Secret Society Woodcraft’s hand-cut cutting boards, alongside dozens more selling everything from hand-poured candles to sports caricatures and needle-felted toys.
Fifteen years of very silly names hasn’t made Evil Genius any less serious about the beer — it’s just made the joke last long enough to become the whole point, and long enough for a song about not fitting in to headline the party.
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