Punk rockers and craft beer aficionados get lucky with Brew Ha Ha's latest fest
Published in Entertainment News
ANAHEIM, Calif. — With luck on their side, Orange Country punk rock and craft beer fans don’t have to wait until November for Brew Ha Ha Productions’ next anarchy-fueled event.
The Lucky Punks! Craft Beer & Music Festival is throwing a St. Patrick’s Day bash at Oak Canyon Park on Saturday, March 15, featuring performances by Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, the Aquabats!, Lagwagon, Street Dogs (performing their “Back to the World” album in full for its 20th anniversary), the Defiant, the Briggs, Pulley, and Hoist the Colors.
Cameron Collins, co-founder of the Orange County-based Brew Ha Ha Productions, wanted to give day-one fans an early treat by bringing the Lucky Punks festival to Silverado, where the first Punk in the Park was set to kick off before the coronavirus pandemic postponed it. Punk in the Park arrived one year later and has since been held annually in November. It’s also grown, expanding to different regions, including San Diego; San Francisco; Chandler, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; and Denver. Collins wants to make sure Orange County fans know they have a special place in Brew Ha Ha’s heart and that they’re not forgotten.
“People in Orange County were getting super frustrated asking, ‘Why are you not bringing it back to Orange County?’ So this time, we wanted to create a cool St. Patrick’s Day kind of cheeky, beer and punk rock music party,” Collins said in a phone interview.
This year’s Lucky Punks! Craft Beer & Music Festival was contingent on delivering a prominent punk rock headliner, so the organizers thought it’d be a good time to tap Bad Religion, whom they hadn’t worked with in a while. Paired with the Bay Area punk rock icons of the Dead Kennedys, superhero skankers the Aquabats! and Boston’s Street Dogs, Collins said the show has plenty to deliver for eager punk rock fans.
“It’ll be the biggest stage we’ve brought to Oak Canyon with video walls and the whole thing,” Collins said. “It’s a big production limited to one stage. There are no overlapping set times or anything like that to worry about. The lineup is fun, and we pride ourselves on curating every festival. For this one, we wanted it to be a super fun, jovial, family-friendly celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.”
In addition to the music, the fest offers a craft beer-tasting lineup featuring a wide selection of over 40 breweries from Orange County, San Diego and beyond. The roster of beverages includes some hard cider options, Pizza Port Brewing Co., RŌM Beer Co., Mission Brewing, Brewery X, Rad Beer Company and more. The beer-tasting component of the festival will run for three hours from noon to 3 p.m. and is sold as a separate add-on for $15.
“There’s just a bunch of great breweries, so the offerings there are fantastic,” he said. “Folks are free to walk around with their beers, sample, go see bands, and come back and forth whenever, which makes it fun. The food will be everything you’d expect from a music festival: pizza, chicken tenders, burritos and tacos.”
In keeping with the youthful energy that fuels punk, Collins said the event will be all-ages to reach the broadest audience, including some of the ones who have grown up to raise a few little punk rockers of their own.
“It’s important that we allow it to be a family movement,” Collins said. “We want to be inclusive to everyone, including kids. It’s the next generation of punk rockers. All the people I grew up with in the punk scene throughout Southern California, Orange County and beyond still identify as punk rockers, and we’ve got kids now. We want our kids to be part of what we love and show them what helped make us the upstanding citizens we are. Many of these bands are getting older too, and you don’t know how long they’ll play.”
While punk rock and craft beer were Collins’s avid interests, he never intended to become a full-time promoter. However, in the mid-aughts, he was frustrated by the lack of craft beer festivals in Orange County, while neighboring cities like San Diego or regions in the northern parts of California hosted all the fun. So in 2010, he and his wife, Tiffany Collins, decided to take matters into their own hands by founding Brew Ha Ha Productions and hosting their first beer fest event in Irvine.
“It was a blast, and I just got bit by the promoter bug,” he said. “We loved it, and we brought it back the following year. Then people started saying they didn’t want to wait another year for another one of them, so we started expanding.”
The following year, the production company launched the Brew Ho Ho Holiday Ale Festival and then Brew Hee Haw at the OC Fair. Most of the early events had some live music with cover bands, but then booked Reel Big Fish for the OC Brew Ha Ha and hit a turning point.
“Everybody loved it, and that was the beginning for me. It was like, okay, now these beer festivals are going to be beer and music festivals,” Collins said. “Beer was the biggest part of it at first, and then music was secondary. Now, it’s shifted where we’ve grown, and we’re selling hundreds of thousands of tickets to festivals all over the world. It’s surreal to look back on because there was no business plan or model. It was never an intention to become what we have become.”
While music festivals around the country continue to disappear, Brew Ha Ha Productions is expanding its footprint. Other events under their banner include Punk In Drublic Craft Beer & Music Festival, Punk In The Park, Brightside Music Festival, Flogging Molly’s Shamrock Rebellion, California Is For Lovers, Silverado Showdown, Summer Roots, Sabroso Taco, Craft Beer & Music Festival, Driftwood Country, Craft Beer & BBQ Festival, OC Boo Ha Ha Haunted Oktoberfest, and more around the world. The production company also helped book the final shows for NOFX.
Collins describes Brew Ha Ha as a smaller boutique festival promoter with curated events with equal partnerships, like they did with NOFX’s final shows and others like the Offspring and Rancid.
“A big part of why we are successful and will continue to be is because we’re not trying to be anything that we aren’t,” Collins said. “We’re also growing because we’re doing it at a realistic pace that’s within our scope. For 2026 and beyond, it’s just one foot in front of the other. We’re not trying to rush the process. We never have.”
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Lucky Punks! Craft Beer & Music Festival
When: Noon on Saturday, March 15.
Where: Oak Canyon Park, 5305 Santiago Canyon Road, Silverado.
Tickets: $54.99 general admission; $149.99 VIP; All passes are available at punkinthepark.com.
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