Close out your July at Toronto’s Festival of Beer

Fittingly, for Toronto’s largest and longest running celebration of beer, there will be 416 brews available to sample at this year’s Toronto’s Festival of Beer.

The late wrestling legend Andre the Giant was a prodigious drinker, but even he would be hard-pressed to quaff an amount of beer equal to Toronto’s area code at the July 28 to 30 event at Bandshell Park at Exhibition Place. Quality over quantity is what I’m most interested in, however, and there should be lots of that to go around.

“We want to give our patrons a chance to discover a whole new world of the tasty golden beverage and I'm confident we've accomplished that,” said Les Murray, the president of Beerlicious and Intelivents, which is responsible for presenting Toronto’s Festival of Beer in conjunction with the Beer Store.

Ontario House will feature 17 breweries while the New Brews Tent will showcase five breweries that are participating in the event for the first time.

While I’ll no doubt drop in on those sites, for the past few years I’ve spent the majority of my time at the World of Beer Pavilion. That will likely be the case again, as this year it will be named the Canada 150 Pavilion in honour of our country’s landmark birthday.

The 20,000-square-foot area will feature 48 brands from breweries from across the country — from Phillips Brewing & Malting Co. from Victoria in the west to Nine Locks Brewing Co. and Spindrift Brewing Co. from Dartmouth in the east. It will feature winners from both the Canadian Brewing Awards and Ontario Brewing Awards along with collaboration brews. Food will be prepared by Matty’s Seafood and Barcue.

Fifteen other food vendors will be on site and the Grilling Tent will showcase different chefs demonstrating their skills in making food with beer each day.

If you want some rhythm and booze, there will be lots of music to accompany all of that drinking and eating. New York hip-hop duo Method Man and Redman will end Friday night’s proceedings, while Toronto via Halifax power pop band Sloan will headline on Saturday and Great Big Sea member Alan Doyle will do likewise with his band The Beautiful Gypsies on Sunday.

Writing this has worked up my thirst. I think it’s time for a beer.