Pastene Beer Fest - Craft Beer Festival

A beer festival born from the village youth

The Pastene Beer Fest is the craft beer celebration of Pastene, a small village in the municipality of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, in the province of Benevento, in the heart of the Sannio region in Campania. It is not organized by a traditional local tourist board or a public body, but by the youth association Giovani Senza Frontiere, which was founded in Pastene and is active year-round with European exchange projects, volunteering, and community initiatives. The Beer Fest is its most visible event, drawing hundreds of people every August from neighboring towns and the city of Benevento.

The result is a festival with a very distinct character: self-produced, informal, with volunteers behind the counters and taps, and a predominantly young audience mingling with local families. Those looking for a guided tasting with a brewer explaining their labels will find something different here: beer is primarily a pretext for gathering outdoors until late at night.

The format: food stalls, live bands, and DJ sets

The documented editions of the event have followed a fairly stable pattern, which helps in knowing what to expect:

• Opening of food stalls around 7:30 PM, with sandwiches, fried foods, and street food paired with beer;
• Live concert in the late evening, usually between 9:30 PM and 10:30 PM, featuring bands from the province of Benevento and inland Campania, often playing popular music repertoires or covers;
• DJ set from 12:30 AM onwards, which closes the evening and turns the festival area into an open-air dance floor.

In the 2023 edition, spread over three consecutive evenings, the stage featured the Tsunami Band, the OMP - Omaggio Musica Popolare project, and the Miuzikant, with DJ sets by Margot, Masan, and the Fratelli Siciliano. In 2024, also over three nights, the stage hosted Tsunami Band, Fusione, and Malaffare, followed by DJ sets from Masan, Giampiero and Miguè, and Essential Agency. In 2025, the festival was concentrated into a single evening, August 8th, for its seventh edition, without losing its village-festival spirit.

Pastene, just over six hundred inhabitants a stone's throw from Benevento

Pastene sits at an altitude of 441 meters on the hills overlooking the Sabato valley and has just over 650 inhabitants: numbers that well describe the type of festival this is. Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, the reference municipality, is a town spread across several hamlets - Pastene, Perrillo, Motta, Montorsi, Bagnara, San Marco ai Monti - just a few kilometers from the Sannio capital. Those arriving for the Beer Fest find themselves in an agricultural landscape of olive groves and vineyards, with Benevento and its Roman and Lombard monuments reachable in about twenty minutes by car.

A piece of the Estate Santangiolese

The Pastene Beer Fest is part of the Estate Santangiolese calendar, which the Municipality of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo builds every year together with the Polo delle Associazioni, a network that brings together twelve local entities engaged in food and wine, cultural, social, and sports promotion. This detail explains a lot about the summer life of this territory: in just a few weeks, the villages pass the baton to one another, each with its own festival.

• Tra Orti e Ulivi in Montorsi, in June;
• the Sagra della Farzora e dei Paparuli 'Mbuttunati in Perrillo, in July;
• the Festa di Sant'Anna and the Festa del Caciocavallo in San Marco ai Monti;
• the Festa della Madonna della Neve in Motta and the Festa di San Donato in Montorsi, in early August;
• the Pastene Beer Fest, in August;
• the Sagra del Cecatiello in San Marco ai Monti, on August 14th;
• the Teatro...vagando reviews and the Riverberi music festival in the municipal capital.

For those visiting the Sannio region in summer, coming across the Beer Fest means entering a wider circuit of food festivals and celebrations that lasts from June to mid-September.

Why it's worth the evening

It is not a major beer festival and does not pretend to be. The value of the Pastene Beer Fest lies elsewhere: in the village atmosphere, the food made by volunteers, the affordable prices, and the live music played by groups that the local audience knows by name. It is the way summer is experienced in the inland areas of Campania: you eat standing up, listen to a band under the stars, and head home when the DJ set is over.