Kona Brewers Festival Returns for 31st Year with Craft Beer, Music, and Community Fundraising

Thirty-one years after its 1996 founding, the Kona Brewers Festival delivered another afternoon of craft beer, island food, and community fundraising at the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel in Kailua-Kona on March 14, with proceeds flowing to Hawai'i Island youth, cultural, and environmental causes through the Ke Kai Ala Foundation.

The festival, organized by the Rotary Clubs of West Hawai'i and associated with the Rotary Club of Kona Community Foundation, ran from 2 to 6 p.m. along the Kona coast, with live music activity listed as early as noon. Ron Artis II headlined the entertainment lineup, which also included hula performances throughout the day. Between 15 and 20 local nonprofits served as beneficiaries of the fundraising, with their members staffing volunteer shifts across the event.

On the pour list, Wailuku Brew Works brought two of the more talked-about entries from Hawai'i's East Side: the Puna Pilsner, a 4.2% ABV, 19 IBU crisp lager described as "a Puna cruiser made for hot days and long hangs," and the Nutty Professor, a 5.8% ABV, 32 IBU peanut butter porter carrying rich dark chocolate character. Aloha Beer Company, based in the Kakaako brewing district, poured hop-infused fruit beers featuring all-natural papaya and blood orange flavors. The festival's featured beer list also included the Notorious IIIPA, a 11.5% ABV, 80 IBU triple IPA described as leading with grapefruit and pine aromas before resolving into citrus, tropical fruit, and honey, and the Diablo Rojo Red, a 5.5% ABV, 40 IBU award-winning amber ale built to satisfy both hop-forward and malt-forward palates. The brewery behind those two pours was not confirmed in available sourcing.

Island chefs and local restaurants rounded out the experience with tasting plates highlighting Big Island culinary traditions, the kind of ʻono bites that have made the event as much a food celebration as a beer festival since its earliest years. Sustainability remained a core operational principle: volunteers monitored a zero-waste stream throughout the grounds, with composting and recycling running in parallel.

Breweries interested in participating in future editions can reach festival coordinator Gonzolo "Gonzo" Garcia at 808-895-5823 or Gonzo@KonaBrewersFestival.com. The festival's own description calls it "one of those hidden gems in the world of craft brew," and three decades of sell-out crowds on the Kona coast make it difficult to argue otherwise.