Four-day beer festival starts in Laško

Warming up the crowd tonight will be a number of Slovenian musicians such as Masayah and Mi2 as well as Baby Lasagna and Gibonni from Croatia.

According to the festival's music director, Urban Centa, the stars of the festival will be Slovenian musicians with the list also including Dan D, Šank Rock, Nina Pušlar and Helena Blagne, but a number of exceptional musicians will also come from abroad, including the lead singer of the former English pop band Spandau Ballet, Tony Hadley, a leading electro-swing band Deladap and the Croatian Eurovision entrant Baby Lasagna.

Every day of the festival, exhibitions will be open at two venues in the town centre, presenting the life in the area in the old days through old photographs. In the evenings parades featuring historic vehicles, brass bands, majorette performances and other groups will entertain the visitors.

As the festival has been promoting sustainability for some years now, especially by encouraging visitors to use green transportation to get to the town famous for beer brewing, free return train tickets will come with every festival ticket. Reusable glasses will again be used to reduce the amount of plastic waste.

Since 1964, the Beer and Flowers Festival has hosted millions of visitors, presented almost a thousand bands and musicians, featured more ethnographic performances than all other ethnographic festivals in the country combined, and hosted gardeners and flower lovers and a number of other artists, the organisers say on the festival's website. Close to 10 million litres of Laško beer has been consumed.

Laško Brewery used to be the largest brewery in the country. In 2015, it was acquired by Dutch beer giant Heineken, and the following year it merged with the Ljubljana-based Union Brewery. In 2021, production was moved from Ljubljana to Laško due to safety concerns, but packaging and logistics activities continue in the capital.