If you were on Vancouver Island in August 2024, you might have stumbled upon a music festival everyone was talking about. The atmosphere there felt like any other festival, with mosh pits, dancing, laughter. But there was one notable difference.
“Everyone was sober,” says Mike Manhas, the festival’s founder.
Manhas, who has spent 20 years battling addiction, says he often felt isolated at music festivals steeped in a culture of drugs and drinking. So in 2022, he created something different — a space where sobriety is celebrated.
That’s how Sober Fest was born: an annual, alcohol-free festival on Vancouver Island focused on connection, fun and healing. All proceeds from ticket sales go to addiction treatment programs.
In its first year, 500 attendees raised $6,000. This year, 4,000 people joined the celebration, helping raise $1.6 million. That money will go to ReWired Recovery Foundation, a non-profit that helped organize the festival, and which will send about 60 people to treatment with the funds.
Sober Fest is part of a broader trend.
Since 2008, alcohol consumption in Canada has fallen twelve per cent, reflecting growing health awareness and evolving social habits.
This cultural change is fueling a new type of celebration: alcohol-free festivals that challenge the traditional link between partying and drinking.
“At the end of the day, everyone deserves to dance at a festival in a safe environment,” Manhas says.
‘Sober-curious’ movement
Music festivals are often billed as immersive experiences, where alcohol and drugs have long played a central — and sometimes dangerous — role. A 2015 report by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse revealed at least five young adults died at Canadian festivals in the summer of 2014.
Now, younger Canadians are leading the charge toward drinking less, sources say. Many are embracing the “sober-curious” movement, which encourages re-evaluating one’s relationship with alcohol without necessarily giving it up entirely.
In fact, many attendees at sober festivals are not completely abstinent. At Sober Fest on Vancouver Island, about one-third of attendees were not in recovery, Manhas estimates. They simply wanted a fun, safe environment.
Niki Sawni, CEO of the non-alcoholic beverage company Gruvi, says about three-quarter of the Canadian company’s customers still drink alcohol, but are cutting back on weekday drinking.
Connect with a community
For 26-year-old Kalil Magtoto, a night of blackout drinking in August was a wake-up call.
“I woke up the next morning and didn’t even know how I got home,” said the Toronto resident. “I thought to myself, I don’t want this to happen ever again.”
Determined to live a “soberish” lifestyle — consuming alcohol more mindfully but not giving it up entirely — Magtoto discovered Toronto’s sober community. In November, she attended Soberish Fest, an alcohol-free event hosted by Bevvy’s, a non-alcoholic beverage shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market.
Bevvy’s founder, Cristian Villamarin, opened the store in January 2024 after noticing a gap in the market. “I wanted a space where people could find great non-alcoholic drinks and connect with a community,” said Villamarin, who has been sober-curious for a decade.
That vision extended to Soberish Fest, which debuted this summer with 1,000 attendees. While alcohol was available, the event celebrated the quality and diversity of non-alcoholic options. In true festival fashion, there was also a DJ.
“These [non-alcoholic] drinks aren’t new, but the perception is that they’re bad. That’s not true,” Villamarin said. “In the last few years, so many high-quality products have come out.”
Villamarin sees these festivals as essential for the sober and sober-curious communities. “It’s about creating a safe space to enjoy music and discover new options.”
All the rage
Rodolfo Aldana, co-founder and CEO of non-alcoholic drink company Parch, refers to sober festivals as a “place of discovery.”
“People go because they want to moderate their consumption or because they want to be sober completely,” said Aldana, who was a vendor at Soberish Fest in Toronto. “These festivals reaffirm their choices.”
“This is something that is happening everywhere,” Aldana added, pointing to a growing number of sober events, including Calgary’s Sober Stampede.
But this shift is not limited to the rare festival or corporate event. The non-alcoholic beverage market in Canada is booming. Ontario’s liquor store, the LCBO, reported a nearly 200 per cent increase in non-alcoholic beverage sales since 2022.
This trend has traditional music venues and festivals hopping on the bandwagon.
In 2023, Coachella, a world-famous music and arts festival held in the California desert, partnered with its first alcohol-free drink shop, The New Bar. It brought the shop back again this year.
Local festivals are following suit. At this year’s Supercrawl festival in Hamilton, Ont., Sawni handed out 10,000 samples of Gruvi to festivalgoers. His non-alcoholic sales at many independent music venues have grown “three to four times” this year, he says.
By reimagining festival culture, events like Sober Fest and Soberish Fest are normalizing sober spaces and demonstrating that joy and connection do not have to come from a bottle.
“Not drinking used to be a punishment,” Aldana said. Now, “these experiences celebrate your choices. And they’re happening everywhere.”
