Homebrew Festival returns to intimate scale, supports Engineers Without Borders fundraiser
About 20 brewers poured several dozen beers at Arcata's D Street Neighborhood Center, with ticket sales backing Engineers Without Borders-USA North Coast Professional Chapter.
The Humboldt Homebrew Festival traded scale for focus in Arcata, where about 20 brewers poured several dozen beers and turned the D Street Neighborhood Center into a fundraiser for Engineers Without Borders-USA North Coast Professional Chapter. The smaller room made it easier to move from table to table, think through a tasting order and spend time with what local homebrewers had made.
That intimate setup marked a return to the event's pre-pandemic feel. In the years before COVID, the festival filled Arcata's much larger community center; this year, it felt "intimate and back-to-basics," with The Mojovators playing multiple sets while attendees sampled a West Coast Bitter, German Pilsner, Kolsch, peach tea fermented to alcoholic effect, Red Ale, Orange Cream Ale and an oatmeal cookie brown ale.
The festival sits inside a broader Humboldt brewing network built around Humboldt Homebrewers, a club founded in 2010 in Humboldt County and organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit partnered with The Ink People Center for the Arts. The group says membership dues help cover expenses such as liability insurance and include admission to events like Humboldt Homebrew Festival, Strangebrew and the Holiday Hangover Hurrah. It also says all pouring events are donation-based under California AB 2609, AB 2172 and AB 1425.
Ticketing details show how the fundraiser has been structured to draw both casual tasters and committed homebrew fans. The 11th annual Humboldt Homebrew Festival was advertised for April 26, 2025, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the D Street Neighborhood Center, with presale tickets at $35 and admission at the door for $40, and organizers said nearly 45 different drinks would be available. The 2026 listing calls it the 12th annual festival, underscoring how firmly the event has settled into Humboldt's spring calendar.
The lineup also reflected the county's habit of overlapping civic roles. Among the brewers named in the festival coverage was Kevin Naset, who also works as a water operator for the City of Rio Dell's Public Works Department. Rio Dell says its water system serves about 1,450 customers from a treatment plant at 475 Hilltop Drive using raw water pumped from infiltration galleries under the Eel River, a reminder that the same people who show up to pour beer often help keep other local systems running too.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Know something we missed? Have a correction or additional information?
Submit a Tip
