Beer culture
Festivals and beer seasons
What each festival actually is, why it started, and what happens there — including the parts that are much younger than they are usually said to be.
How BeerHQ handles festivals
Every record carries a status and the date it was last checked against the organiser’s own material, because festivals stop and start and nobody updates the sites that say otherwise. BeerHQ does not state that a future edition will happen unless an organiser has confirmed one, and it carries no attendance figures — they are quoted everywhere and traceable almost nowhere.
These pages describe origin, ceremony and institution. They are not travel guides, they sell nothing, and they do not encourage drinking.
Currently running
- Belgian Beer Weekend
Belgium’s brewers take over the Grand-Place in Brussels for a weekend each September — a national trade body’s festival held in a UNESCO world heritage square.
- Christmas and winter beer
Across northern Europe the biggest and darkest beers of the year are released for winter — a genuinely old seasonal logic that survived into a modern marketing category.
- Fresh hop season
For a few weeks after the hop harvest, brewers use hops that were never dried — a beer that cannot be made at any other time and cannot be shipped far.
- Great American Beer Festival
The Brewers Association’s festival and competition in Denver — the event that tracked the American craft sector from a few dozen breweries to several thousand.
- Oktoberfest
Munich’s civic festival, which began as a horse race at a royal wedding in 1810 and became the occasion the whole city organises its autumn around.
- Starkbierzeit
Munich’s strong beer season, held during Lent, when the city’s breweries release doppelbocks and the halls fill for a second, smaller festival season.
Not currently running
Kept because they explain something, and marked so that nothing here reads as an invitation to attend something that is not happening.
Related
Beer culture · Serving customs and rituals · Pubs, brewhouses and beer gardens · Beer cities and regions