Brewery & the Beast returns August 30 with live-fire cooking spectacle

Brewery & the Beast, one of Canada's most celebrated culinary festivals, returns to Vancouver on August 30 with a lineup of chefs known for ambitious live-fire cooking feats that extend far beyond typical restaurant kitchens.

The festival, which started in Victoria in 2012 and expanded to Vancouver in 2013, has become a playground for chefs to experiment and showcase creativity in ways restaurants alone don't permit. Founder Scott Gurney says the foundation has remained consistent: exceptional food cooked over live fire using high-quality ingredients from farms and ranches that raise animals responsibly.

"Cooking with live fire has always stayed true," Gurney explains. "It's always been about using very high-quality ingredients."

Over the years, the event has become known for increasingly ambitious cooking projects. One favourite example came from Vancouver, when chef Alex Chen created a vertical fire installation using stacked honey drums filled with flames. Rather than cooking over the fire, an entire pig was suspended beside it. In Calgary, another chef cooked an entire bison using a custom-built cooking structure designed by welders and fabricators — the process took more than 24 hours.

What continues to impress is not the crowd size but the sheer creativity on display. Every chef seems determined to push things further than the year before, whether building a custom fire pit, cooking a whole animal, or creating a dish guests talk about for weeks.

Two Rivers Specialty Meats, a long-standing partner since the festival's earliest days, helped establish the standard Brewery & the Beast became known for — one focused on quality, sustainability, and responsible farming practices rather than commodity products.

The event gives chefs a platform to dream big while the festival team provides infrastructure and support to bring those ideas to life. That cycle of ambition and support explains why chefs continue to return year after year.