Lovers of North Carolina craft beer should head to downtown Raleigh from 3-9 p.m. Saturday for Brewgaloo, a craft beer event with live music and food trucks.

Fifteen breweries from Roth Brewing Co. to Big Boss Brewing, Sub Rosa to Fortnight (the latter two haven't even opened yet) will be pouring beer in City Plaza, or the 400 block of Fayetteville St. There is no cover charge. You must buy brew bucks to purchase beer: $1 buys one brew buck, 5 brew bucks gets you a pint of beer, or 1 brew buck gets you a 3-ounce tasting. If you buy brew bucks online before the event, you can get 25 brew bucks for $20. On Saturday, it's full price. Go HERE to buy brew bucks.

The event is open to the public. You can come to the event and then go have dinner and go back to taste more beer. The event will happen rain or shine.

There will be four bands (The Small Ponds, Hank Sinatra, Mel Melton & the Wicked Mojos and I was Totally Destroying It) and five food trucks (Klausie's Pizza, Cafe Prost, Big Al's BBQ, Chirba Chirba Dumpling and Baguettaboutit.)

The event is sponsored by Shop Local Raleigh, which is funded by the Greater Raleigh Merchants Association. About Brewgaloo, organizer Jennifer Martin says, "We just want to get consumers focused on shopping local, eating local and drinking local."

Travis Long and Takaaki Iwabu, a couple of our staff photojournalists, went over to 3009 Hillsborough to document the demolition of  The Brewery, a popular music venue in Raleigh since 1983.  They put together a video that is really good, with nostalgia and backhoes. Dan says check it out.

Today's paper has a story about a proposed multi-story building on Raleigh's Hillsborough Street strip, to be anchored by a Kerr Drug and include offices, residential space and perhaps a restaurant. As for what the project might displace, the people pushing it don't seem overly concerned. The story quotes Karen Rindge (identified as "a neighbor and director of the advocacy group WakeUp Wake County") saying this:

"What's there right now is abysmal. That side of Hillsborough Street is desperate for redevelopment."

Well...one person's "abysmal" and "desperate for redevelopment" block is another person's irreplaceable historical landmark. That particular block houses The Brewery, which is one of the most fabled nightclubs in local-music history. It's not just the soon-to-be-famous acts that played the Brewery on their way up (Cranberries and Sheryl Crow among them), but the place's landmark status in local-music history. Whiskeytown played countless shows there back in the day, and local supergroup Tres Chicas formed in the Brewery's bathroom. Countless other local acts played their earliest public performances on its stage, too.

Even after Raleigh's live-music epicenter gravitated downtown, the Brewery kept on. It's the first place I ever saw a show here and if this really is the end, I'll miss knowing it's there.

ADDENDUM (8/3/11): Down it comes.

Jesse Malin is New York City through and through, bur Raleigh is still a big part of his lexicon. For one thing, Malin's old D Generation bandmate Richard Bacchus lives down here. For another, Raleigh expatriate Ryan Adams helped launch Malin's solo career, producing his first solo album back in 2002.

"Ryan and I met in Raleigh at the Brewery, in the parking lot in 1995 or '96," Malin said in a recent phone interview. "We stared hanging out, talking music. I'd see him in North Carolina, he'd see me in New York. Then he moved up here and we got to be drinking buddies, which led to jamming and hanging out and him producing my first album. He's been a great friend and a great guy to be around, his musical energy is always super-inspiring. He's been involved in most of my records, either playing bass or guitar or some crazy percussion part."

For more, including details on Malin's Raleigh show this weekend with Bacchus, see the preview in Friday's paper.

A local farmer finds food for his animals in a brewery's spent grain. Read more about it here.