A Mural Is Coming To The Sunnyland Bike Path. The Brewery Row Feeding Into It Already Changed Hands.

If you told an out-of-town friend this year that Sunnyland has six breweries within stumbling distance of each other, you were right two years ago. Something changed on Carolina Street since then, and the punch card you'll pick up this month is the proof.

Two things are converging on this neighborhood right now. One is the return of Sunnyland Fest, the brewery pub crawl that's run every September since 2020 or so and looks, on the surface, exactly like it did last year. The other is a piece of news that broke quietly two weeks ago: the bike path on Ohio Street just got picked as the site of the district's next piece of permanent public art, months before a single brush touches it. Neither story is loud on its own. Together they say something about how this particular corner of Bellingham actually works, which is that the block can look unchanged while almost everything behind the storefronts turns over.

What The Punch Card Actually Says Now

In 2024, Sunnyland Fest ran four days, September 19 through 22, and the punch card sent you to six taprooms, including Twin Sisters Brewing Company at 500 Carolina St. A year later the festival ran a tighter Friday-through-Sunday window, September 26 to 28, and the card had five stops instead of six. Twin Sisters wasn't on it. Stemma West was, at the same Carolina Street address.

Here's what happened in between. Twin Sisters had its Sunnyland building on the market since at least August 2023, first at $3.7 million, then down to $3.3 million by September 2024, a price that covered the building along with the restaurant and brewing equipment inside it. Stemma Brewing bought the whole thing outright on December 31, 2024, and folded it into its operation as a second location, aiming to have part of the space open within a couple of months and the rest running by early summer 2025.

So the taproom count on the crawl route didn't drop. The building is still there, the beer garden is still there, and the most recent staging of the crawl still visited five walkable stops: El Sueñito, Kulshan Sunnyland, Otherlands Beer, Stemma West, and Wander Brewing. What changed is who signs the lease at 500 Carolina St, and that's the kind of detail you only notice if you're paying attention to the block rather than just the address on your punch card.

Kulshan's own framing of the event hasn't needed updating either way:

This is truly a pub crawl of epic proportions.

Based on the last two Septembers, expect this year's Sunnyland Fest to land somewhere in the back half of the month again. As of today, that's still ahead of you.

What Hasn't Moved

Not everything on this stretch of James Street is about who owns which building. Kulshan's original Sunnyland taproom, the one that opened in April 2012 and still runs the brewery's small-batch and R&D program, keeps its own weekly rhythm going regardless of what's happening two blocks over on Carolina. Sundays bring Sunnyland Unplugged, an all-day happy hour with free live acoustic music. Every second Tuesday of the month, ten percent of taproom sales goes to a local nonprofit the brewery is supporting that month.

Across the intersection at James and Virginia, Greene's Corner has built its identity around food first and beer second, running an in-house kitchen that turns out thin-crust pizzas and scratch-made sandwiches alongside sixteen rotating taps. Its live music calendar has been cycling the same three acts back and forth through late summer: Sharp 5 Collective, the Old Time Fiddle Jam, and Yankee Drivers Bluegrass all played in August, and the same three return through September. None of that required a change in ownership to keep going. It's the part of Sunnyland's identity that survives whatever's happening with deeds and closing dates one street over.

The Bike Path Is Getting New Artwork

The other Sunnyland story this month didn't come out of a brewery at all. It came out of the Portal Container Village on Bellingham's waterfront, where the fourth annual Noisy Waters Mural Festival ran August 14 through 16, 2026, with nearly twenty artists from across North America and Europe painting live on portable eight-by-eight walls while the public voted for favorites.

Denver muralist Catie Michel took the grand prize with a depiction of a wolf surrounded by native plants. The two runners-up, Oak Bloak (also known as Max Coleman, also from Denver) and Jessa Gilbert of Squamish, British Columbia, earned something more concrete than a ribbon: cash contracts to come back and paint permanent murals somewhere in the city. Two of those three sites landed in Sehome, at the Samish Station apartment complex and the new Bellingham Dental Group building on Ellis Street. The third landed here, along the bike path on Ohio Street in Sunnyland, where Jessa Gilbert will paint.

The exact design hadn't been finalized as of the announcement, and the murals themselves aren't going up this fall. Based on how the festival's prize cycle has run in past years, expect the actual painting to happen in spring or summer of 2027. Which means if you ride or walk that stretch of Ohio Street between now and then, you're looking at a wall that's already been claimed for something new, even though nothing about it looks different yet. That's worth knowing before the scaffolding shows up and you're wondering what prompted it.

What To Actually Do This Month

• Pick up a Sunnyland Fest punch card at any of the five participating breweries once the crawl kicks off later this month, and get it stamped at each stop for a shot at the raffle.
• If you want food with your beer, check Greene's Corner's calendar before you go. The pizza and the live sets are as reliable as anything on this block.
• Take note of the Ohio Street bike path corridor over the next several months. That's where Jessa Gilbert's mural is headed, and it'll be one of the few pieces of public art in Bellingham you can say you watched get picked before it existed.

None of this changes what Sunnyland is on a Tuesday night. The Kulshan taproom still runs its small-batch program, Greene's Corner still turns out the same three acts, and the crawl still visits five stops on foot. What's different is what's underneath: an ownership shuffle on Carolina Street that most people crossed off without noticing, and a stretch of bike path that's about to become the newest thing in the neighborhood without a single new building going up. That's the version of Sunnyland worth knowing if you already live here, not the postcard one.

If you're weighing what a Sunnyland address is worth this fall, whether you're the one on the punch card or just thinking ahead, Michelle Harrington can run the numbers on your specific block. Get Your Instant Home Valuation and see where your street actually stands.