With luck on their side, Orange Country punk rock and craft beer fans don’t have to wait until November for Brew Ha Ha Productions’ next anarchy-fueled event.

Lucky Punks! Craft Beer & Music Festival will be a St. Patrick’s Day bash at Oak Canyon Park on Saturday featuring Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, The Aquabats!, Lagwagon, Street Dogs (performing their “Back to the World” album in full for its 20th anniversary), The Defiant, The Briggs, Pulley and Hoist the Colors.

Cameron Collins, co-founder of Orange County-based Brew Ha Ha, wanted to give fans an early treat by bringing the Lucky Punks festival to Silverado, where the first Punk in the Park was set to kick off before the coronavirus pandemic forced its postponement. Punk in the Park arrived one year later and has since been held annually in November. It’s also grown, expanding to San Diego; San Francisco; Chandler, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; and Denver. Collins wants to make sure Orange County fans know they have a special place in Brew Ha Ha’s heart and that they’re not forgotten.

“People in Orange County were getting super frustrated, asking, ‘Why are you not bringing it back to Orange County?’ So this time, we wanted to create a cool St. Patrick’s Day kind of cheeky beer and punk rock music party,” Collins said in a phone interview.

This year’s Lucky Punks! fest had to have a prominent punk rock headliner, so the organizers thought it’d be a good time to tap Bad Religion, which they hadn’t worked with in a while. Booking the Bay Area punk rock icons of the Dead Kennedys, superhero skankers The Aquabats! and Boston’s Street Dogs, the show has plenty to deliver for eager punk rock fans, Collins said.

“It’ll be the biggest stage we’ve brought to Oak Canyon, with video walls and the whole thing,” Collins said. “It’s a big production limited to one stage. There are no overlapping set times or anything like that to worry about. The lineup is fun, and we pride ourselves on curating every festival. For this one, we wanted it to be a super fun, jovial, family-friendly celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.”

In addition to bringing music, the fest has a craft beer-tasting lineup from more than 40 breweries from Orange County, San Diego and beyond. The roster includes hard cider options, Pizza Port Brewing, ROM Beer, Mission Brewing, Brewery X, Rad Beer and more. The tasting component will run from noon to 3 p.m. and is sold as a separate add-on for $15.

“There’s just a bunch of great breweries, so the offerings there are fantastic,” he said. “Folks are free to walk around with their beers, sample, go see bands and come back and forth whenever, which makes it fun. The food will be everything you’d expect from a music festival: pizza, chicken tenders, burritos and tacos.”

In keeping with the youthful energy that fuels punk, Collins said the event will be all-ages to reach the broadest audience, including some who have grown up to raise a few little punk rockers of their own.

“It’s important that we allow it to be a family movement,” Collins said. “We want to be inclusive to everyone, including kids. It’s the next generation of punk rockers. All the people I grew up with in the punk scene throughout Southern California, Orange County and beyond still identify as punk rockers, and we’ve got kids now. We want our kids to be part of what we love and show them what helped make us the upstanding citizens we are. Many of these bands are getting older too, and you don’t know how long they’ll play.”

While punk rock and craft beer were Collins’ avid interests, he never intended to become a full-time promoter. However, in the mid-aughts, he was frustrated by the lack of craft beer festivals in Orange County, while neighboring cities like San Diego hosted all the fun. So in 2010, he and his wife, Tiffany, decided to take matters into their own hands by founding Brew Ha Ha Productions and hosting their first beer fest event in Irvine.

“It was a blast, and I just got bit by the promoter bug,” he said. “We loved it, and we brought it back the following year. Then people started saying they didn’t want to wait another year for another one of them, so we started expanding.”

The following year, the production company launched the Brew Ho Ho Holiday Ale Festival and then Brew Hee Haw at the OC Fair. Most of the early events had live music from cover bands, but then they booked Reel Big Fish for the OC Brew Ha Ha and hit a turning point.

“Everybody loved it, and that was the beginning for me. It was like, OK, now these beer festivals are going to be beer and music festivals,” Collins said. “Beer was the biggest part of it at first, and then music was secondary. Now, it’s shifted where we’ve grown and we’re selling hundreds of thousands of tickets to festivals all over the world. It’s surreal to look back on because there was no business plan or model. It was never an intention to become what we have become.”

While music festivals around the country continue to disappear, Brew Ha Ha Productions is expanding its footprint. Other events under its banner include Punk in Drublic Craft Beer & Music Festival, Punk in the Park, Brightside Music Festival, Flogging Molly’s Shamrock Rebellion, California Is for Lovers, Silverado Showdown, Summer Roots, Sabroso Craft Beer, Taco & Music Festival, Driftwood Country Music and Craft Beer Festival, OC Boo Ha Ha Haunted Oktoberfest, and more around the world. The production company also helped book the final shows for punk band NOFX.

Collins describes Brew Ha Ha as a smaller, boutique festival promoter. “A big part of why we are successful and will continue to be is because we’re not trying to be anything that we aren’t,” Collins said. “We’re also growing because we’re doing it at a realistic pace that’s within our scope. For 2026 and beyond, it’s just one foot in front of the other. We’re not trying to rush the process. We never have.”