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‘Beer Beef Band’ food festival at Tinian on July 24
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Posted on Jun 28 2021
Edwin P. Aldan
TINIAN—The Municipality of Tinian and Aguiguan is coming up with a new food festival that will be called “Beer Beef Band,” which is intended to showcase the island’s cattle industry. The event has a tentative date of July 24 this year.
In an interview last Saturday, Tinian Mayor Edwin P. Aldan hopes the event will join the Annual Tinian Hot Pepper Festival—better known by Tinian residents as “Pika Fest”—as another food festival on the island that will draw crowds from the community and tourists alike.
According to Aldan, he hopes that the event will be Tinian’s equivalent to Saipan’s Taste of the Marianas, envisioning top restaurants and hotels showcasing their best dishes using Tinian beef. Aldan also has plans for there to be a cooking competition for the community, where contestants put up their best beef dishes for judging.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downtime that the CNMI has been experiencing, Aldan sees this period as the perfect time to assess what could be other economic drivers alongside tourism as the CNMI slowly opens up. “We’re lucky that we have federal funds coming our way, but sooner or later those federal funds will dry out, so where do we go from here? I think this is the perfect time to really look at what economic stimulants that we can get out of our islands,” said Aldan.
Aldan also hinted at some progress in the revival of Tinian’s beef industry, saying that members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently inspected Tinian’s slaughterhouse. According to Aldan, all that is left to do is “very minor stuff.”
