6-Pack of Things To Do In Tacoma: Sept. 1-7 2025

Because this week Tacoma doesn’t just offer plans—it detonates them: hops and pumpkins colliding in seasonal mayhem, ghosts of hop kings and bat-winged biologists raising pints, soul food reinvented as streetwide communion, and jazz horns coiling through lambic funk until the very walls exhale.

Fresh Hoptoberfest: The Ninth Pour | Monday, Sept. 1

Behold the annual collision of Yakima’s green gospel and Bavaria’s malty hymnals: Fresh Hoptoberfest: The Ninth Pour takes over Peaks & Pints for the entire month of September, a ritual now nine years strong and only gaining in madness. From Sept. 1 through 30, our taps will hold steady at four sacred stations—two fresh hops alive with sticky, electric harvest resin, and two Oktoberfests pouring caramel-amber memory straight from Munich’s centuries-old playbook. Every day, no exceptions. This is not pumpkin spice cosplay. This is beer’s true equinox: fleeting lupulin lust and malt-drenched tradition waltzing together until the leaves catch up. Expect pretzels, polka, beer flights (including Sept. 1), maybe even rogue Bavarian techno if the night gets weird. It’s part harvest festival, part time machine, part love letter to the fact that hops taste most alive in their brief, blazing moment. Raise your stein, chase the resin, revel in the malt. Because once the Ninth Pour vanishes into October, you’ll be waiting another year for the saga to return. Oktoberfest meets fresh hops, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily through September, Peaks & Pints, Basecamp Proctor, Tacoma, no cover, just pours

Proctor Pumpkin Pandemonium | Tuesday, Sept. 2

Every fall, Proctor shrugs off its porch-light manners and explodes into a pumpkin carnival: markets stacked with orange fortresses, sidewalks crisp with leaf confetti, the air itself perfumed with nutmeg audacity. Peaks & Pints joins the rebellion by handing Tap #23 over to pumpkin beer’s unruly reign—this year led by Rogue’s Pumpkin Patch Ale, a spiced-and-roasted spectacle brewed with whole gourds hacked by hand and flung into the kettle like offerings to October. It’s not subtle—vanilla, ginger, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel, all ablaze until your glass smells like caramelized carnival rides—but it is ritual, rooted in the scrappy history of colonial “pompion” ales and inflated by decades of modern seasonal theater. Love it, loathe it, Instagram it—doesn’t matter. The pumpkins are here, the pint is poured, and Proctor is about to smell like harvest mayhem weeks before the leaves even turn. Pumpkin beer, All day, Peaks & Pints, Basecamp Proctor, Tacoma, no cover

Grit & Grain Podcast | Wednesday, Sept. 3

The Grit & Grain Podcast drags a chair up to history’s unruly campfire and sits down with Shelly Schlumpf of the Meeker Mansion Board and Puyallup Historical Society to conjure the ghost of Ezra Meeker, Tacoma’s own Oregon Trail survivor turned “Hop King of the World.” Meeker was the original Pacific Northwest lupulin hustler, transforming the Puyallup Valley into a global hop empire in the 1880s, shipping tens of thousands of bales overseas while somehow also running the post office, founding schools, and protecting Chinese laborers when anti-immigrant mobs came calling. His kingdom eventually collapsed under the weight of hop lice and financial ruin, but the man never stopped — building mansions, chasing new ventures, and living nearly a century like some stubborn pioneer demigod who refused to quit.

“Shelly Schlumpf from the Puyallup Historical Society will discuss their upcoming project to build a ‘modern’ hop barn that they will design to be a taproom, event space, and living museum dedicated to the hops history of Puyallup and Ezra Meeker as an extension of the Mansion,” explains Matt McLaren, co-host on the Grit & Grain. Come for the history lesson, stay for the pint in your hand — a reminder that every beer in Washington still carries a little Meeker grit in its foam. Beer podcast, 3:30 p.m., Peaks & Pints Events Room, Basecamp Proctor, Tacoma, no cover

Hops For Habitat | Thursday, Sept. 4

Some fundraisers wear tuxedos and drone on with PowerPoints. This one wears bat wings, orders another round, and bellows “save the otters” while you’re mid-sip. Hops For Habitat returns to Peaks & Pints courtesy of the Point Defiance Chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers‘ Drinking For Conservation and their fearless, costume-loving ringmaster Suzanne Akerman. From 6–9 p.m., fifty cents from every pint, pour, and proclamation funnels straight into The Nature Conservancy, protecting Washington’s forests, rivers, and shorelines. This partnership isn’t new—we’ve been shoulder-to-shoulder with DFC since before Peaks even opened, watching them rally for rhinos, buzz for bees, and absolutely lose it for bats. The premise is simple, stubborn, and brilliant: drink beer, save animals, repeat until the polar bears sleep easier. So raise a glass to habitats worth saving, to creatures still hanging on, and to the righteous idea that conservation tastes better when served cold. Pints for nature, 6-9 p.m., Peaks & Pints, Basecamp Proctor, Tacoma, no cover

SoulFull Festival | Saturday, Sept. 6

Call it a feast, call it a movement, call it Tacoma’s annual reminder that food made with Soul has no borders. The SoulFull Festival (formerly Soul Food Festival), jointly produced by Black Night Market and Tacoma Arts Live, takes over downtown Broadway with eight straight hours of heat, spice, and groove, redefining soul food as a global passport: Southern comfort piled high with greens and cornbread, Creole fire, Jamaican jerk, Trinidadian curry, Polynesian smoke, Mexican street heat, Asian street magic, and more—all dishes laced with history, community, and unapologetic love. And because you can’t dance on an empty stomach, the festival doubles down with live Neo-Soul bands, comedy, kid zones, beatboxing battles, a beer garden, dance performances, and the Black Night Market, where vendors sling everything from handmade art to dream-soaked fashion. It’s a sensory overload staged as cultural communion: smells curling through the streets, basslines thumping against storefronts, laughter ricocheting down Broadway until even the sidewalks feel like they’re dancing. This is what happens when food is more than fuel—it’s memory, resistance, and invitation all at once. Community festival, 2-8 p.m., Downtown Tacoma, 917 Broadway (between 9th & 11th), no cover, all ages, details at blacknightmarket.com

Kareem Kandi World Orchestra | Sunday, Sept. 7

Peaks & Pints wants you to have a musty, horse-blanketed, spontaneously fermented good time this Sunday night — and who are you to say no to wild yeast and saxophone ecstasy? It’s Jambic & Lazz, our first-Sunday sacrament: Kareem Kandi’s molten sax trio swirling through the Events Room like microbes in a French oak foeder, 5–8 p.m. every first Sunday until the end of time (or at least until the funk runs dry). Jazz, after all, is crime’s unofficial soundtrack—smoky reeds, brush-snared drums, basslines slippery as alley shadows—and Kandi is Tacoma’s coolest perpetrator, a saxophonist rooted in blues, classical, and funk who’s played from here to Europe and back, never once losing the grit that makes him ours. This week, he brings his World Orchestra into our Fireplace Room, and Peaks counters with an all-day lambic flight: tart, barnyard, old-world funk to sip while horns coil around the rafters. Come drink the jazz, taste the yeast, and remember that nothing legal should feel this illicitly good. Jambic & Lazz, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Peaks & Pints Events Room, Basecamp Proctor, Tacoma, no cover

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