THUNDER BAY - The weather has cooperated to bring wonderful conditions to an enhanced beer experience at the fourth annual Brew Ha festival.
Fifteen breweries, over 100 types of beer and ciders, and over 5,000 people. That’s the recipe for what organizer Jon Hendel considers a marquee beer event.
“There’s no better setting for a festival,” Hendel said during the afternoon session at Marina Park.
The breweries - who range in headquarters from Kenora to Ottawa - seem to agree.
“There’s always a great crowd here and a lot of beer lovers, that’s why it’s always a permanent fixture,” Kevin Oliver who represented the Ottawa-based Beau’s.
“We only go two of these festivals a year, and BrewHa! is one of them,” North Bay’s New Ontario brewmaster Mike Harrison said on Friday. “Thunder Bay is a great city, and much like North Bay it’s built around its waterfront. We plan on putting BrewHa! For our permanent calendar.”
The 15 breweries at the festival all offer unique ales, stouts, lagers, sours, and ciders for any consumer. This year organizers made an effort to encompass more drinks.
“We have lots of different opportunities here,” Hendel said. We have a craft vodka mixed with club soda. We have real flavours like grapefruit or mint… we have a coffee beverage for non-alcoholic people, there’s a lot of choices all throughout the BrewHa layout.
Also new to this year’s event is a new booth called the BrewHa select reserve - a curated selection of beers that are special seasonal one-offs, and are very hard to find here.
“It’s very fancy,” Hendel said.
Timmy Tennant and his nephew Daniel Pedulla were first-timers at BrewHa in 2018. Tennant praised the practicality of the festival.
“It gives you the opportunity to try different beer that you’d never buy at the store because you’d have to get a full one,” he said. “This way you can sample and pick the ones you like the best.”
The event gives Thunder Bay - and specifically the downtown core - a good name.
“I think it makes the downtown core more vibrant. Anything we bring down here is a benefit to the city, and shows how we can make use of our venues.”
“We partner with a whole bunch of people in the waterfront district, so you find samples and head up the street to find those beers on tap at local restaurants,” Hendel explained, saying that BrewHa's impact goes further than the event itself.
“We’ve been told by so many people in the Waterfront district that say it’s their biggest weekend of the year.”
Beau’s Lager - based in Ottawa, O.N. - have been making a name for their brewery at BrewHa for a number of years.
“A lot of people don’t know about Beau’s here, so they’re definitely surprised by some of our beers.”
Beau’s offers a blonde ale named Tom Green's Summer Stout which offers all the flavour of a stout beer in a blonde ale.
“A lot of ‘Wow’s’ or ‘What is this?,’ the best part is to see the reaction,” Oliver said.
The final evening session will run on Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. Tickets for this session are sold out.
