BY WILLIAM DEAN
Missed out on tickets to this year’s sold-out Festival of Dark Arts? Don’t take it too hard.
Sure, you’ll have to hear friends recap the Mardi Gras-like excitement, and scores of stouts available in Astoria only on Feb. 15 will disappear. But there is good news.
February is Stout Month!
It’s the frigid time of year when Fort George Brewery, the host of Dark Arts, allows delicious, creamy stouts to dominate its taps and fill its coolers. It’s also the time when the warming dark beers are being made at craft breweries throughout the North Coast. Visit those breweries and you’ll find many of the special brews featured at the festival, albeit for a limited time.
Fort George is again offering a free-play pop-up arcade in the Lovell Building all month long, and a no-cover “Aftermath” party the day after the festival features prized stout bottle releases and more live music.
Dark Arts started in 2012 as a local event that mixed beer and art. It is now the biggest stout beer festival in the nation.
The 2025 edition will feature more than a hundred stouts, many wildly inventive. A quarter of those brews will be made by Fort George, including four barrel-aged Matryoshka variants.
Attendees will also have the rare opportunity to sample Matryoshka straight out of the barrel. Just two have been selected by brewers as the best of the best, so what’s inside won’t last long.
As for entertainment, there will be 25 bands representing most musical genres, headlined by rap/hip-hop legend Brother Ali. Musicians will be scattered on three stages, playing simultaneously.
Other performers include a magician, juggler, ice sculptor and stilt walker, fire and belly dancers, a mysterious act involving machetes and “a woman who walks on broken glass,” according to Fort George spokesman Brian Bovenizer.
Food options are ample, with the return of “bacon on a stick,” pizza, tacos and more. A new item – fried octopus tentacles – makes a great dare.
Attendance is capped at 3,000, but the wave of tourism that comes with the festival is now felt for a full week if not longer. Hotels, restaurants and theaters are usually packed.
Jessamyn Grace West, who ran the downtown historic district association for years, has performed as a belly dancer and tarot card reader at every Dark Arts.
“I haven’t missed one yet,” she said. “It’s an amazing crowd. … People are literally coming from other countries to attend, which I think is wonderful.”
The combination of Dark Arts and the Fisher Poets gathering at the end of February energizes the city, West said. “Here’s this time when we feel like we should all be hibernating because the weather is atrocious, and we are creating art, beer, music, poetry … and I think that just speaks to the vibe of this area.”
Jack Harris, co-founder of Fort George, introduced Stout Month to the North Coast when he was making beer in Cannon Beach. When the Astoria brewery opened, Harris turned what had been a small festival into a marquee event.
“I’m super proud of the festival,” said Harris, who now works for KMUN. “It’s way beyond whatever I thought it could be.”
Bovenizer says Dark Arts devotees crave an “experience” and enjoy being surprised. That’s part of the reason why the festival typically sells out in minutes – long before the music and beer lineups are announced.
“We just want to blow people away with the experience,” he said.
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WILLIAM DEAN is a novelist and former investigative journalist who enjoys writing about the art of craft brewing. Astoria Beer Zone is his blog.
(This column originally appeared in The Astorian).
