For one night each October, the biggest room in Tacoma fills with the smell of hops, the sound of a few thousand people in costume, and the sight of brewery booths trying to out-spook each other. Boo Five Three, the Halloween edition of what used to be called Brew Five Three, takes over the Parade Floor of the Tacoma Armory at 1001 S. Yakima Ave. on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026. It is a beer festival with a costume contest bolted on, and it has become one of the more unusual traditions in a city that has plenty of them.
The name is a local joke that doubles as a map coordinate. 253 is the area code for Tacoma and much of Pierce County, so "Brew Five Three" was always a way of saying "the 253's beer festival." When the event moved to an October date and added Halloween trappings, the name bent into Boo Five Three, which is either a pun or a spelling lesson, depending on how you look at it. Either way, the 253 is still in there.
Tacoma Arts Live, the nonprofit that presents the festival, bills it as Tacoma's longest-running beer festival. The event's own history backs that up: the 2025 edition was the twelfth annual. For most of that run it was a summer event, staged in August and built around live music as much as beer. The 2025 version was promoted as the festival's return to its roots in downtown Tacoma, a homecoming after some years of wandering. The shift to October and the Halloween theme is the newer wrinkle, and it appears to have stuck.
The format is straightforward and built for grazing. General admission and early-entry tickets both include a souvenir tasting glass and eight drink tokens, which is enough to work through a decent survey of Washington craft beer and cider without committing to any single pour. Designated-driver tickets are cheaper and come with nonalcoholic beverages instead of tokens, a detail that matters at an event where the whole point is drinking. Food trucks handle the eating. Everyone has to be 21 or older with valid ID.
What separates Boo Five Three from a standard tasting is the competition running in two directions at once. The breweries are not just pouring; they are decorating their booths, and attendees are the audience for a contest that rewards going absurdly overboard with cobwebs, carved pumpkins, fog machines and whatever else a taproom crew can haul into a former drill hall. Meanwhile the attendees are competing too, in a costume contest that turns the floor into a moving parade of costumes. The result is a room where the people serving the beer and the people drinking it are both in character.
The setting does a lot of the work. The Tacoma Armory was built in 1908 and opened in 1909 as a Washington National Guard facility, and for most of a century it served double duty as a military training hall and a civic gathering space, hosting graduations, dances, concerts and sporting events. Its guest list over the decades reads like a history textbook: sitting presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Harry S. Truman all visited, as did Crown Prince Olav and Princess Märtha of Norway, and Orson Welles. The building was named a Tacoma historic landmark in 1976. The National Guard closed it in 2011.
What happened next is the part of the story that makes the beer festival possible. In 2013, Tacoma developer Fred Roberson bought the Armory from the Guard for $950,000 and began restoring it, eventually spending about $2 million on renovations. Roberson was a builder who had already turned around other historic properties in the city. He died in 2022, and the Armory was gifted to Tacoma Arts Live by Roberson and his family. The Parade Floor where the festival happens is the reason the building works for something like this. At more than 20,000 square feet, it is one of the largest indoor spaces in Tacoma, an open span that can hold a few dozen brewery stations, a fleet of food trucks outside and a few thousand costumed drinkers inside without anyone feeling packed in. A smaller adjoining space, the Roosevelt Room, has exposed brick and hardwood floors for more intimate events. The Armory also has a habit of turning up in the news: in early 2026, reporting noted that the Armory would soon be on the market, its long-term future uncertain just a few years after the handoff meant to secure it. That makes events like this one a live part of the building's story rather than a nostalgic footnote.
For anyone deciding whether to go, the practical case is simple. It is a walk-up general-admission festival rather than a seated ticketed show, so you can drift between booths, eat, vote with your eyes on the booth decorations and leave whenever the costume gets uncomfortable. Eight tokens is a reasonable pace for an evening. The early-entry option buys first crack at the taps before the room fills. And the costume contest gives the whole thing a reason to be more than a tasting: it is a Halloween party that happens to have very good beer.
Boo Five Three runs Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, at the Tacoma Armory, 1001 S. Yakima Ave., Tacoma. Tickets are 21 and older with valid ID.