Burp Fest at Alaska Craft Brew & Barley Wine Festival 2026

The Alaska Craft Brew & Barley Wine Festival has one of the most colorful origin stories in the American beer festival world. It traces back to the mid-1990s, when two separate Anchorage beer evangelists were independently trying to build a craft beer scene in America's Last Frontier. Event promoter Steve Shepherd organized a beer festival after being inspired by one he attended in California; it was so successful that he staged a bigger follow-up the following January. Meanwhile, Billy Opinsky — the self-proclaimed "Ambassador of Beer" and owner of Humpy's Great Alaskan Alehouse — launched his own winter beer festival to "raise the awareness of good beer drinking among the general public," timing it to coincide with the Annual Anchorage Fur Rendezvous. Opinsky's event was nomadic in its early years, bouncing from the Linford Warehouse to University Center to a furniture store to the Center for the Performing Arts. Eventually, Shepherd and Opinsky merged their talents — Shepherd was an adept organizer, and Opinsky knew beer — to create a single, definitive event.

The barley wine component arrived in 2000, when the festival added a dedicated barley wine competition and rebranded with a logo designed to imitate an Air Force badge. That pivot gave the festival a focus that no other major beer event in the country could claim. Held at the end of January at the Dena'ina Center in downtown Anchorage, the festival leans into its winter setting rather than apologizing for it — as organizers have noted, "What better beer style to go with cold, dark winter days?" than barley wine, the rich, high-alcohol style that warms from the inside out. The event has drawn beer luminaries from as far as Vermont, Ontario, and the British Isles, and publications like All About Beer have profiled it as the world's premier winter brew event. Now organized by the Brewers Guild of Alaska in partnership with Peak 2 Peak Events and the Anchorage Daily News, the festival features over 100 breweries, cideries, meaderies, and beverage producers across three sessions, a commercial beer competition, live music, and even a petting zoo — because in Alaska, even the beer festivals are a little wild.