Oregon Brewers Festival

The Oregon Brewers Festival is held annually on the last full weekend of July on Tom McCall Waterfront Park along the Willamette River. Roughly 80 breweries from Oregon and across the United States pour beers from covered pavilions along the riverfront. Entry to the grounds is free; tasting requires purchased tokens.

The festival is deliberately casual — no assigned seating, no VIP area, minimal commercial signage — which preserves the community feel that made it successful. It runs Thursday through Sunday, with Thursday and Friday being less crowded. The waterfront location means the festival benefits from Portland's reliably warm July weather. It is among the longest-running large outdoor beer festivals in the United States.

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The Oregon Brewers Festival was founded in 1988 — when Portland had just a handful of craft breweries — by Art Larrance, who has remained involved with it for decades. It was one of the first large outdoor beer festivals in the United States and helped establish Portland's identity as a craft beer city at a time when that identity was not yet obvious. The festival's growth from a few thousand attendees to over 80,000 tracked almost exactly with the national craft beer boom.

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