Gangneung's coffee festival goes beyond the cup

The 18th Gangneung Coffee Festival runs Wednesday through Sunday, Oct. 21 to 25, 2026, centered on Gangneung Coffee Street near Anmok Beach in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, with programming extending to the city's pine forests, harbor and surrounding neighborhoods. This year's slogan, "Coffeeful Gangneung," points to an expanded footprint: organizers have pushed the festival beyond the original beachfront strip and into the wider city, according to fnnews.

Free shuttle buses, five vehicles running every 15 minutes from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., connect festival sites during the run. A receipt-reward promotion, open to purchases of 50,000 won or more at participating businesses, now covers all of Gangneung rather than just the coffee-street cluster, a change that signals how far the city wants festival spending to travel this year. The event is organized by the Gangneung Culture & Arts Foundation (033-647-6802), with full programming and updates posted at coffeefestival.net. Admission to the festival grounds is free, with individual tastings and café purchases priced separately at vendor stalls.

Gangneung's claim on coffee culture goes back to the 1980s, when a single bus route to the coast ran only three times a day and a trip to the beach vending machines facing the sea became an all-day outing. The city's first specialty café followed around 2001 or 2002, though sources disagree on which roaster deserves the credit, a tangle the Jakarta Post and Euronews have each tried to untangle without quite agreeing. The first Gangneung Coffee Festival launched in 2009, and the city has used the event since to argue that its identity as a coffee town runs deeper than a row of scenic cafés.

Last year nearly scuttled that argument entirely. A severe drought dropped the Obong Reservoir to 13 percent of capacity, prompting a national disaster declaration and water-use restrictions that climbed from 50 percent to 75 percent. Gangneung canceled both the Coffee Festival and its companion Noodle Festival in mid-September 2025, judging it inappropriate to stage large gatherings while residents faced water shortages, according to Seoul.co.kr. The disaster declaration lifted on Sept. 22, and the city reversed itself days later, reinstating both festivals for a delayed Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 run meant to revive a local economy battered by the dry spell. Organizers said at the time they would restrict tap-water use on site to keep what they called the lesson of the drought in mind, and the reinstated 17th festival reportedly drew crowds from its first day.

This year's edition follows directly on the heels of the 2026 ITS World Congress, the intelligent transport systems conference held at Gangneung's Olympic Park from Oct. 19 to 23, drawing attendees from more than 70 countries across 193 sessions. City materials cited by news.mtn.co.kr describe plans for multilingual signage and overseas marketing timed to the Congress, and the coffee festival's Oct. 21 opening, two days before the Congress closed, looks built to catch international visitors already in town rather than wait for them to leave.

The festival's environmental turn predates this year's expanded radius. The 2021 edition banned single-use cups across the grounds, requiring visitors to bring personal tumblers or use reusable cups for tastings, and partnered with a reusable-cup startup called Ppo-deuk to supply them. The 2022 edition kept the plastic ban in place and ran a hybrid version, in person and online, of the festival's signature "100 People, 100 Tastes" ceremony, in which 100 baristas brew hand-drip coffee simultaneously, a spectacle the Korea Herald has covered as a recurring opener rather than a one-time stunt.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has designated the event one of Korea's official Cultural Tourism Festivals for 2026 and 2027, a status tied to government funding and promotion. Visitor counts vary by source, with some travel outlets citing figures above 500,000 for the festival alone and others putting the combined coffee-and-noodle turnout nearer 300,000 in recent years. Neither figure has been confirmed against a post-event report from the Culture & Arts Foundation, so travelers should treat them as estimates rather than fixed numbers. What is confirmed, as of this writing on Oct. 24, 2026, is the shuttle schedule, the receipt-reward threshold and the five-day run through Anmok and beyond, with 100 baristas due to pour hand-drip coffee at once somewhere along Gangneung Coffee Street before the weekend is out.