Fear the Beer

Do you have any plans for Halloween? If not, you’re in luck.

On Friday, Oct. 30, five bars downtown Windsor will open their doors to the public for Halloween festivities.

The Windsor Beer Exchange, Phog Lounge, Craft Heads, Villains Beastro, and Snackbar-B-Q are participating in the third annual Downtown FRIGHT Club event hosted by Downtown Flight Club, a group of people who love food and drinking.

The event begins at 8:30 p.m. and will end at 1:30 a.m. Tickets cost $40 and can be purchased at the Windsor Beer Exchange.

The bars are encouraging crawlers to dress in costumes.

Crawlers will meet at the Windsor Beer Exchange to register. At 8:00 p.m., there will be a group photo and crawlers will get a shot of whiskey. From there, they will take off on their flight in groups of 30 to the rest of the bars, led by their flight captains. Groups will finish the crawl at the bar where they started.

Frequent Flyers of the Downtown Flight Club will be given access to pre-sale tickets.

Brian Datoc, bartender at Craft Heads Brewing Co., said tickets are almost gone.

“So far 175 tickets have been sold here alone. Our bar can hold up to 250 people, but for this event it looks like we’re going to push the boundaries as much as possible and try to fit 300 people max in here. Tickets were almost sold out in a matter of three days.”

Datoc explained why he predicts this year will be more successful than the past two.

“I think because of the fact that all of the participating bars have worked together to promote each other, our group effort has made this event more known to the public, rather than solely promoting our own bar as usual. Social media, Facebook in particular, is the most important tool for us. I mean, this year the popularity of this event was mainly by word of mouth, but social media created that buzz in the first place,” he said.

Datoc added he and the rest of his staff has prepared for this event for months, including designing their own costumes.

Every year, the bars involved in the Downtown FRIGHT Club get together to discuss what did and didn’t work and how they can improve in the future years.

This year, Craft Heads expects their most popular beverage to be the Turbulent Peanut Butter and Chocolate Porter- a crowd favourite. They’re also excited to introduce five new pumpkin beers for crawlers to taste test.

Tickets are still available for this event. For more information, check out Downtown FRIGHT Club’s Facebook event page.