Downtown Cary turns into a three-day block party this weekend when the Cary-Grove Area Chamber of Commerce runs its annual Main Street Fest from Friday, September 25 through Sunday, September 27. It is free to attend, funded by sponsors and donations, and built around the same footprint the festival has used for years: Main Street itself, with overflow into the BMO parking lot, the south parking lot, and the Cary Ale House lot a few blocks over.
What has not stayed the same is the town around it. Two businesses that gave Cary some of its recent identity, a brewery with a genuinely famous founder and a longtime ice cream shop, are both gone this year, for very different reasons. The festival keeps returning to the same street corners on the same weekend every fall. The businesses on the streets around it do not get that same guarantee.
What's Actually Running This Weekend
The Chamber has published a day-by-day schedule, and it is worth having on hand before you park.
| Day | Time | What's happening | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, Sept. 25 | 5:00–9:30 PM | Live music: Hillbilly Rockstarz (5:30 PM), Pino Farina Band (7:30 PM); food trucks | Main Stage, downtown Cary |
| Friday, Sept. 25 | 5:30–7:30 PM | Singo | South parking lot |
| Saturday, Sept. 26 | 1:00–7:30 PM | Family Area: crafts, games, community booths | BMO parking lot |
| Saturday, Sept. 26 | 3:30–7:00 PM | Baggo Tournament | Downtown Cary |
| Saturday, Sept. 26 | 1:00–9:30 PM | Live music, Chicago Trivia Guys, food trucks | Main Stage, downtown Cary |
| Sunday, Sept. 27 | 8:30 AM | Main Street Fest 5K | Starts at Cary Ale House parking lot |
| Sunday, Sept. 27 | 9:00 AM–Noon | Community Breakfast | South parking lot |
| Sunday, Sept. 27 | 9:00 AM–1:00 PM | Cary Farmers' Market | BMO parking lot |
| Sunday, Sept. 27 | 9:30 & 11:30 AM | Live music: Matt Anderson, New Vintage Strings | Main Stage, downtown Cary |
A few practical notes. Parking is available in both Metra lots downtown. No coolers or outside alcohol, though lawn chairs are fine if space allows, and dogs are welcome on leash. The event runs rain or shine. Sunday's 5K is hosted by and benefits the Cary-Grove High School Trojans Track & Cross Country Association, and the Community Breakfast is run by the Cary Firefighters Association, so both of those mornings raise money for specific local groups rather than just filling time between music sets.
The Building on Three Oaks Road
None of that happens near 3300 Three Oaks Road, a business park corridor on the other side of town from Main Street. But it's the address that best explains how quickly a Cary business can go from local landmark to vacant storefront, and it's a story worth knowing if you've wondered why Spirit Water hasn't reopened.
Spirit Water was a brewery and distillery co-owned by Tim Kovac, who built his name and fortune as the founder of Not Your Father's, the root beer and hard soda brand, and of Small Town Brewery before that. Kovac and his business partner, Jagdish Chevli, moved the operation to Cary in 2019 after closing Small Town Brewery's original Wauconda location. For a few years it worked. Then it didn't.
According to court filings, Kovac fired Chevli in 2023 after accusing him of financial mismanagement. What followed was a string of lawsuits and countersuits in McHenry County court. Kovac's side alleged that Chevli, without Kovac's knowledge, had bought the Three Oaks Road building himself in 2019 under a separate company and then charged Spirit Water rent on it, ultimately diverting more than $1.4 million through what the lawsuit called secret rents, a doubled salary to himself, and close to $230,000 in credit card charges. Chevli's side countered that Kovac owed back rent. In March 2026, a McHenry County judge ordered Kovac to pay Chevli $161,000 in unpaid rent plus roughly $18,000 in attorney fees. Spirit Water had already closed for good on November 30, 2025.
The space sat empty for about seven months. In July 2026, the Cary Village Board approved a new tenant: Decked Out Builders, operating as All Things Backyard & Outdoor Living, an outdoor furniture and construction business specializing in composite decks, covered porches, outdoor kitchens, pergolas, and fire features. The plan is to turn Spirit Water's old outdoor patio, once built for beer flights and live music, into a display showroom. As the owners put it when the deal was approved, the goal is to give homeowners a local place to see and compare backyard products before deciding what to put in their own yard. The building's owner, notably, is still Chevli.
It is a small story in the scope of a town of roughly 18,000 people. But it says something concrete about how long a storefront can sit dark in Cary before it finds its next use, and about how a single local falling-out can ripple into a building's future for years.
Cary Dairy's Quiet Exit
Spirit Water was not the only locally owned Cary business to close recently. Cary Dairy, a locally owned ice cream shop, closed abruptly this year on the same day a judge granted the village permission to remove a sign the business had been operating with, one the village said had been violating its ordinance for years. The shop's closing and the village's sign dispute landed on the same day, and the ice cream counter is one more local place that Cary regulars will no longer be stopping at.
Spirit Water and Cary Dairy ended their runs in different circumstances, one connected to a legal dispute between former partners and the other to a disagreement with the village over signage. Both were locally owned, and both leave a space that a new tenant will eventually fill.
What Doesn't Change
What has stayed constant through all of that is the calendar the Cary-Grove Area Chamber of Commerce runs, and Main Street Fest sits at the center of it. The festival is explicitly the fundraising engine for a handful of other Cary traditions that return every year regardless of which storefronts are open on Main Street at the time:
- The Merry Cary Parade
- Cary Halloween Walks
- Cary Cruise Nights
- A scholarship fund for Cary-Grove area students
Layer in what's already built into this weekend specifically, the 5K that funds Cary-Grove High School's track and cross country program, the Community Breakfast that funds the volunteer firefighters association, and the Cary Farmers' Market that's described locally as a Sunday morning tradition rather than a one-off vendor pop-up, and the pattern gets clearer. Individual businesses in Cary open, fight, and close on their own timelines. The Chamber's calendar doesn't wait on any of them. It reuses the same weekend, the same parking lots, and largely the same volunteer base year after year, which is a different kind of stability than any single storefront can offer.
That's worth knowing whether you're planning your Saturday around the Baggo Tournament or just wondering why the building that used to smell like hops on Three Oaks Road now sells pergolas. Main Street Fest will be back next September on roughly the same footprint. What's occupying the storefronts around it by then is a separate question, and this year's turnover is a reminder that the answer isn't fixed.
If you're out on Main Street this weekend and find yourself thinking about what a Cary address might be worth or wondering what's changed in your own corner of town, the team at Morrison Home Team knows this stretch of McHenry County well and is happy to talk it through, festival crowd or not.