This past Saturday, September 26, was one Montrose Oktoberfest. This coming Saturday, October 3, is another.
Neither date is a typo. Montrose is home to two separate fall beer festivals that share a name, sit a week apart on the calendar, and get mixed up by longtime residents every single year. One is a ticketed nonprofit fundraiser inside an amphitheater. The other is a free street festival that shuts down the 2200 through 2400 blocks of Honolulu Avenue for carnival rides. If you skipped the amphitheater fundraiser without realizing what it was, there's still time to catch the street festival version before the season's out, and if you've ever shown up looking for a Ferris wheel at the craft beer event, you're not alone.
The Beer Festival Comes First
This year, the Montrose Rotary Amphitheater hosted the fundraiser version on September 26, its 20th year benefiting All Points Transit, the local paratransit nonprofit that helps residents get to appointments and errands they couldn't otherwise reach. The Black Canyon Homebrewers Association poured the beer, with attendees voting on their favorite brewery entries, while Mojo Birds and The Black Canyon Boys handled the live music. The program included a costume contest, stein hoisting, and a stein relay.
Tickets ran $20 online during early bird presale through September 15, with day-of pricing at $30 online or $40 at the gate. A $20 non-drinking ticket was available for anyone attending with kids, who got in free at 12 and under. As APTA president and CEO Dr. Paul Skoutelas put it in materials tied to the event, "Mobility is not about moving people; it's about moving lives."
It's the smaller, more contained of the two events. It happens at a fixed venue, it has a clear beneficiary, and it draws a crowd that's there as much for the cause as the craft beer.
The Street Festival Comes Second
A week later, on Saturday, October 3, from noon to 10 p.m., the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce takes over the 2200 through 2400 blocks of Honolulu Avenue for the version most people picture when they hear "Montrose Oktoberfest." This one draws a claimed 20,000-plus attendees across the day, and it looks the part: a full midway with rides named Mindwinder, Sizzler, Starship, Zero Gravity, Pirates Cove, Super Slide, and Dizzy Dragon, plus a separate kids' zone stretching from Aladdin Rugs and Gallery down to Sabrina's Pizzeria Napoletana with a Ferris wheel, a funhouse, and toddler-scaled rides like Kid Power Kids and Lady Bugs.
Admission is free, but rides and food run on a ticket system, and the merch booth sits across from the Tarlani lot on the 2300 block if you want a shirt or a stein to remember it by. Last beer pour is 9:45 p.m., last call to queue for rides is also 9:45, and everything shuts down at 10.
Same Name, Different Century
The shared name comes from two civic traditions that grew up independently, each tied to its own organization and its own purpose. The Montrose Chamber of Commerce traces back to November 10, 1922, when it was incorporated by a small group of local businessmen with James L. Brown as its first president. Verdugo City joined the fold in the 1960s, giving the organization its current double-barreled name, and it's this Chamber that has run Oktoberfest as one of its signature Honolulu Avenue events for decades. It's civic infrastructure at this point, tied to the same organization that manages the Montrose Shopping Park's identity year-round.
All Points Transit's version, by contrast, is a nonprofit fundraiser built around a specific mission: keeping a paratransit service funded. Twenty years running puts its start sometime in the mid-2000s, decades after the Chamber's street festival was already an institution. Each version serves its own crowd. The All Points Transit event is held at a fixed venue with proceeds tied to a cause, and the Chamber's festival takes over a closed stretch of street in the merchant district.
Knowing which is which matters for logistics as much as anything else. If you wanted a beer tasting competition benefiting a transit nonprofit, that was this past Saturday's stop at the Rotary Amphitheater. If you're bringing kids and want a night built around rides in a free-to-enter format where you only spend money on what you use, October 3's street festival on Honolulu Avenue is still ahead of you.
Filling the Weekend Around Both
Around both Saturdays, one just gone and one still ahead, the neighborhood doesn't pause. The Montrose Harvest Market runs every Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the 2300 block of Honolulu Avenue, rain or shine, closed only for Christmas and Easter. It's an off-loaded market, meaning vendors can't sell out of their vehicles, and many of the smaller grower-direct stands are cash-only, so it's worth having bills on hand if you're after fruit or flowers rather than the vendors set up for card payments. September into October is the tail end of stone fruit season locally, so the market's produce mix is shifting toward early fall varieties.
If you're looking for where to eat around either Oktoberfest, Honolulu Avenue doesn't make you choose just one kind of night out. Sabrina's Pizzeria Napoletana sits right at the edge of the October 3 kids' zone and serves Neapolitan-style pizza built on imported Italian flour and San Marzano tomatoes. A few doors down, Casa Córdoba has been serving Spanish tapas and paella out of a converted Spanish-style building since 2013. Backbone, from the team behind McCall's Meat & Fish, leans into contemporary American plates with French technique and Spanish and Asian accents, including a nori waffle with uni that shows up on nearly every mention of the place. Café Montrose and Curbgrill round out the corridor for something more casual, and Picala, a newer Spanish tapas spot, has been drawing early praise from neighbors who caught its pre-opening tastings.
Working Off Either Festival at Deukmejian
For the morning after, Deukmejian Wilderness Park sits at the top of Dunsmore Avenue, a 709-acre stretch of chaparral and sage scrub named for former California governor George Deukmejian. The old Le Mesnager stone barn at the trailhead is a leftover from the property's vineyard days, and it now functions as a small visitor center. From there, the Dunsmore Canyon Trail follows the creek uphill with some shade and a few benches, feeding into the Crescenta View Trail if you want longer mileage, or the Le Mesnager Loop if you'd rather stay lower and still get ridge-top views back over the valley. Hikers chasing the full Mount Lukens summit are looking at somewhere between 9.8 and 10.8 miles round trip depending on route, with close to 2,800 feet of elevation gain, so it is a full-day outing best planned with plenty of water.
Both festivals land on the same stretch of Honolulu Avenue that carries the neighborhood's daily rhythm the rest of the year, which is part of why the naming overlap sticks. Same street, same shops in the background, two different organizations each marking the season in their own way. If Saturday's fundraiser caught you off guard, file the date away for next fall. October 3 is still open on the calendar, and now you know exactly what you're walking into.
If you're the kind of Montrose resident who tracks which Saturday belongs to which Oktoberfest, you probably also keep half an eye on what's happening with the houses around Honolulu Avenue. Haynes Group follows both. Reach out if you'd ever like a local read on either.
