Party-goers flood Taxman Brewing Co.’s Bargersville location during last year’s Death and Taxes Day. This year’s event will be April 22, and will include the release of Deadline and its variants, live music, more than 50 breweries and food trucks.
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As the saying goes, death and taxes are inescapable facets of life.
But area beer lovers, and people simply looking for a fun way to spend a spring Saturday, will want to do whatever they can to get to the Bargersville festival of the same name.
Death & Taxes Day returns courtesy of Taxman Brewing Co., with an event bigger and better in every way this time around. Participants can try samples from more than 50 Indiana breweries, distilleries, wineries and cideries, while enjoying live music and food, as well as checking out downtown businesses.
Taking over most of downtown Bargersville, organizers hope to create an event that appeals to a wide variety of the community while celebrating the unique home of Taxman.
“It’s really fun. There are a lot of beer festivals, and people are attending them more often. I think what makes this special is, we’re in downtown of an old community,” said Leah Huelsebusch, who founded Taxman with her husband Nathan. “It has the atmosphere and the feel that’s a lot different than what other people experience in a typical beer festival.”
Taxman Brewing started celebrating its annual Tax Day soirée in 2015, about six months after the brewery and restaurant opened up in Bargersville. The Huelsebusches had lived in Belgium for more than two years, where Nathan Huelsebusch worked as an international tax director for Cummins. That experience proved to be the inspiration for Taxman Brewing.
Many of their projects feature accounting or financial terminology: Deduction dubbel, Exemption tripel, Gold Standard blonde ale, Tax Holiday dark strong ale.
So it made sense to have a party around April 15, the traditional filing day for taxes.
Every year, the event has gotten a little bit bigger. Nothing compares to this year, though. With the opening of sister restaurant Pizza & Libations, located north on Baldwin Street, organizers wanted to spread things out and include more of downtown Bargersville.
“The big thing for us was just expanding the ground. Historically, it’s been on the Taxman side of Baldwin Street,” Nathan Huelsebusch said. “The last couple of years, we had over 2,500 people, so it’s started to feel a little congested. With our new pizza restaurant opening on the north of Baldwin Street, we had the opportunity block all of the street off between our properties and more or less double the size of the event space.”
At the center of the celebration is the release of one of Taxman’s signature beers, Deadline. The rich, roasted and robust Belgian-style stout is aged with Indonesian vanilla beans and rested several months on Kentucky whiskey barrels.
For Death & Taxes Day, brewers have created four variants of the beer: maple vanilla, hazelnut latte, salted chocolate peanut, and chocolate caramel and coconut.
Ticketholders of the so-called Death & Taxes Day Experience can pick up four-packs of cans of the varieties to take home with them, in addition to getting sample pours of the Deadline versions and unlimited sampling from other breweries, wineries, cideries and distilleries. The tickets include a commemorative snifter glass.
Other ticket packages include the tasting experience, which includes sample pours and the ability to purchase four-packs of Deadline. Festival admission allows people to enjoy the music and food, as well as buy Deadline, but not any samples.
Participants from all over Indiana will be pouring throughout the event, including county businesses Hoosier Brewing, MashCraft Brewing, Mallow Run Winery, Nailers Brewing, Oaken Barrel Brewing, Planetary Brewing, Quaff ON! Brewing and Smocktown Brewing.
“The key to a beer festival, if you’ve never been to one, is you have to pace yourself. You don’t have to drink all the beer,” Nathan Huelsebusch said. “But people can expect a lot of diversity. The amount of different styles of beer that Indiana breweries are producing is impressive. The quality is very, very good. It’s a wonderful showcase of what a great job Indiana does from a brewing perspective.”
In between samples, live music will be featured on two stages with popular area acts Dean Martini, Tastes Like Chicken, The Failers and The 78’s.
“Being able to spread out the festival allowed us to have two stages this year. It spreads everyone out and have the opportunity for fewer lines, and just feel a little more open,” Nathan Huelsebusch said.
Food from Taxman Bargersville, Pizza & Libations, Cellar Market’s Bakery + Bottle Shop, Johnson’s BBQ and Pap’s Kettle Pop will help revelers keep the day going.
Beyond the festival itself, businesses throughout Bargersville will be open. Coffeehouse Five, which recently opened a downtown location, will be serving coffee drinks during the day and showing off their new location.
The day is an opportunity for people to discover what Taxman’s founders discovered years ago — that Bargersville is a unique place to be.
“One thing that is really neat this year is, there are more restaurants who have joined downtown, so they’ll be open,” Leah Huelsebusch said. “It’s an opportunity to see what’s happening in downtown Bargersville.”
