Back for its third year, the Langford Beer Festival, hosted by the Victoria Beer Society (VBS) will showcase over 75 craft brews, including some ciders and meads, from 30 BC breweries. The festival—coming to the Starlight Stadium on July 13—will also feature lawn games and activities, music by local band SuperSauce, and a variety of food trucks for hungry drinkers.
Some of these beers will be represented by VBS’s own pub on wheels that currently shows up on Friday afternoons across from Floyd’s Diner in Langford for Fridays at the Station.
VBS event coordinator Lee Marchbanks is also excited about the launch of the Victoria Beer Society Beer Quest app, which creates a fun way for people to discover more local craft beer around town.
“It goes along with our tradition of promoting local beer culture, getting people that are visiting or live here excited about going out and exploring all the local breweries and pubs, to try and get out and try as much of the local beer as possible,” says Marchbanks. “Essentially, you can set up quests to map out different neighbourhoods, and it gives you four or five or six locations that you can do your own mini brewery crawl or pub crawl. It’s another tool to get people out and about, trying local beer.”
The app is more than just fun, however, because for every event you visit or quest you complete, you’ll earn points that may be used to obtain discounts.
“It’s a great way to run contests—we’re giving away tickets for the Langford Beer Festival every Friday out in Langford for people that check into the app,” says Marchbanks. “You accumulate points for every quest that you accomplish and every check-in that you do, and you can put that towards discounts on tickets to our festivals and events and stuff like that.”
Public safety is always a concern at events where large numbers of people go out into the public and get sloshed, and the main risk is on the road. Recognizing this, Victoria Beer Society has partnered with BC Transit to provide free bus fare for festival-goers.
“We are literally giving free bus fare to everyone that attends Langford Beer Festival and [September’s] Great Canadian Beer Festival,” Marchbanks says. “It’s a free ticket that you can redeem using the Umo app, and get home safe riding the bus.”
VBS has been hard at work on further improving the festival for this year and cementing it as yet another staple of the flourishing craft-beer scene on the lower island.
“We’re honing in on the third year, taking the things that we’ve learned over the last two years, and making minor tweaks to make Langford Beer Festival fun and accessible,” says Marchbanks. “I’m really excited about all the breweries that are coming; the beer list is shaping up great. There should be something there for everybody, and it should be a really good time.”
Langford Beer Festival
3 pm to 8 pm Saturday, July 13
$45, Starlight Stadium
langfordbeerfest.com