A Vancouver Island curling club is going viral on Tiktok, and not for throwing rocks.
Instead, it’s a video of steel beer kegs sliding down the sheet that’s blowing up the internet, racking up more than 4 million views in just three days.
The Comox Valley Curling Centre held its fifth beer keg curling event last week, an annual event that raises money for various local charities.
The curling centre goes through plenty of beer in a season, and keeps their kegs cool by stacking them along the wall inside the rink area. One year as they were closing down for the season, inspiration struck as general manager Keith Parry was looking at the stacks.
“I thought, ‘I wonder how well a keg would curl on the ice, because it has a similar round bottom like a curling stone,’” he said. “We tried it and an empty beer keg curls remarkably well.”
That birthed the annual tournament, a partnership with a handful of Vancouver Island breweries who supply the curling centre.
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“We got a big, bright gold trophy,” said Bryn Thomas, a sales representative at Mt. Arrowsmith Brewing, this year’s champions.
“Afterwards the guys and I thought do we get a team together and start throwing some real rocks? But I think our talent is clearly throwing some metal kegs down the ice.”
The rules of beer keg curling are the same as for the regular sport — except they play with a half-sheet of ice, owing to the kegs weighing less than half what a normal stone does.
There’s also a little less strategy.
“Typically it’s more of an aggressive hitting game with keg curling, the subtleties are lost a little, they don’t throw guards and come around, they just throw them in the rings and smack the heck out of their opponent,” Parry said.
While the club has been holding the event for years, and has posted a number of videos online, the activity didn’t go global until this year.
Tiktok poster Erin Haluschak said she captured the perfect throw — with the keg landing nearly on the button — and quickly posted it online with the hashtag #ElbowsUp, which is currently trending about simmering U.S.-Canada tensions.
“Everybody was cheering because it was just such a great shot, and I thought, ‘Oh this is great, just toss it up online,’ and didn’t think much would happen from there … a little after 72 hours after the video was posted we’re just shy of 4 million views,” she said.
“Like so many people commented, this is pure Canadiana, and I think the timing of it lined up right.”
While Parry believes his club is the only facility in the world to currently host a “beer keg bonspiel,” that might change. Haluschak said the video has accumulated comments from curlers across the country who want to adopt the concept.
The Comox Valley centre may have to make room for more participants in the future, as well.
“We were limited to eight breweries the last couple of years, but I think we will be full at 12, or maybe we go 24,” he said.
“I can only see it kind of taking off from here.”
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