This time last year, Laura Lodge and her team made the decision to cancel the 21st annual Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival, which was slated to take place in Breckenridge, Colorado, in January 2021. A year later, even with nationally available vaccines and a relaxing of COVID-era restrictions on indoor dining and drinking, Lodge is still uncertain about the festival’s fate for January 2022. She can’t even say when she’ll need to make the call to cancel it or move forward.
“It feels like an arbitrary mental health deadline, because we really don’t have [a hard deadline],” Lodge says, noting that the event venue hasn’t yet asked her to sign a contract. “At this point it’s: How much time do I need to pull this off?”
The precarity of Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines—one of the country’s most prestigious and exclusive annual beer festivals—is familiar to other beer event organizers this year. Even events that are going ahead this spring and summer are grappling with questions of attendance caps, distancing protocol, vaccination status, and the safest way to get beer from draft lines to drinkers’ mouths. With health experts warning that the U.S. will not reach herd immunity any time soon due to vaccine hesitancy, the pandemic continues to loom over scheduled events with the unfortunate potential to turn them into superspreader sites. The catch: Everything from neighborhood tap takeovers to national festivals are critical to breweries’ identities and bottom lines.
One logical way to make events safer is to reduce the number of attendees. This puts fewer people into contact with each other and allows for social distancing. Some festival organizers, like Lodge, say that’s just not possible if their events are to financially survive—these types of gatherings were designed for packed crowds. But the concept of smaller, more exclusive events also raises a philosophical question: If already-limited beer events become even more exclusive, who is able to attend, and who is left out?
Over the past year, the beer industry has more closely examined the ways in which it attracts, caters to, and reflects the tastes of primarily upper-middle-class white men. Consumer-facing festivals and events like the Black-led Barrel & Flow Fest and women-centric Beers Without Beards have been some of the primary tools for expanding that audience through beer, conversation, and fellowship. A more inclusive beer community manifests, physically, over clinking glasses and group selfies.
Traditionally, in-person beer events have not been inexpensive: Beer Under Glass, the annual kickoff to Chicago Craft Beer Week, cost $60 for general admission tickets in 2019; Detroit Fall Beer Festival cost $50 in 2019; and tickets to just a single session of the 2019 Great American Beer Festival cost $85.
If the pandemic forces beer events to become smaller, even more expensive, more exclusive, or all-virtual, will they continue to extend a welcome to underrepresented drinkers? Virtual events may be more accessible in certain ways, but they are not necessarily less expensive. Untappd’s 2021 virtual Go Hard festival costs $110 for a box of 11 non-beer alcoholic beverages; 2020’s virtual BeerFest2U, which included a case of 24 beers, cost $99.
Questions of access and inclusivity are important to Day Bracey, founder of Pittsburgh’s Barrel & Flow Fest (formerly Fresh Fest), which celebrates, spotlights, and pays Black artists and brewers. This year, it will take place using a hybrid virtual and in-person model Sept. 10-12. After orchestrating an all-virtual festival last year, Bracey is glad to offer an in-person option again.
“[A virtual festival] is definitely much harder, especially from a marketing standpoint. Word of mouth doesn’t travel as fast,” Bracey says. “It’s not as cool to invite your friend to a virtual event. They’ll be like, ‘What the fuck, that sounds like work.’”
Last year’s virtual format, in response to the pandemic, had pros and cons in terms of creating greater access to the festival. On one hand, attendees were able to take part from anywhere in the world, joining digital breakout rooms to spark transcontinental conversation. The virtual tickets for this year’s event are less expensive than the in-person event—$10 for a digital experience, versus $50 for festival general admission—and there’s no cap on the number of attendees. On the other hand, because virtual events aren’t as physically visible as in-person ones and don’t inspire the same, “Hey, let’s all go together” social plans, they risk not reaching new drinkers.
“A virtual event, the target demographic for that is going to be folks that are already interested in your in-person event, or the cause around it,” Bracey says. “That’s the reason why somebody is attending our virtual event from Australia, because they want to support the cause of the fest.”
Speaking on a Craft Beer Professionals panel on the state of beer festivals in early May, Matt Leff, founder and producer of Nashville-based events company Rhizome Productions, described a similar intimacy and exclusivity that characterized the virtual beer events he coordinated during the pandemic. One of those events, the Rhiz(H)ome Virtual Beer Experience, was limited to just 24 packages of beer, each intended to be shared by two people, at a cost of $99 per package. Many of Rhizome’s other virtual events cost roughly $100.
“We focus our virtual experiences on small engagements, so the majority of our events were targeted to 24 to 48 people, focused pretty much on our local market,” Leff said. “We kept them small; we kept them engaged; we kind of did it for our core audience. It was a little bit less about the bigger picture and more about home, I guess you could say.”
Bracey says Barrel & Flow’s hybrid model will offer the best of both worlds. It will make space for physical camaraderie between longstanding beer fans and new ones, as well as keeping the virtual option open for people who can’t attend in person for reasons of money, physical disability, work obligations, or health concerns. The goal is to maximize the number of people who can attend—making literal space for new beer drinkers—while keeping the physical event safe.
A more inclusive event isn’t only about who attends; it’s equally about who’s pouring beer. Including as many breweries as possible has for years been a challenge for Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines, which since 2014 has seen the number of breweries interested in participating exceed its ability to host them all. In 2020, the event had 180 participating breweries, with 17 on the waiting list. Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines is for many a bucket-list event, offering world-class skiing opportunities during the day and what Lodge calls “white-tablecloth” culinary and educational programming in the afternoons and evenings. A full weekend VIP pass to the festival costs $675, exclusive of lodging and ski lift passes.
The board of Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines, which operates as a nonprofit, has created a system to ensure that if a brewery applies to have a pouring table three years in a row, it will be granted access on the third year. That also means that some breweries that have had table assignments in the past won’t be guaranteed to keep them. Breweries sometimes take this personally, Lodge says.
“The price is the people who are upset, who feel less than because of that,” she says. “It’s not intended to be that way but we have to figure out a way to continue to bring in new people and grow, but we don’t have more space.”
Additionally, breweries that receive table assignments are able to invite another brewery of their choosing. While this can bring new breweries and brewers from underrepresented groups into the fold, it also relies on existing social and business connections between brewers—who are predominantly male and white. The Brewers Association’s 2019 Brewery Operations Benchmarking Survey found brewery ownership by non-white people was listed at 9.6%, compared to a national average of 29%, as measured by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
As the pandemic reduced most people’s travel, Lodge says she and other organizers regrettably haven’t been able to scour the country as they normally would to recruit up-and-coming breweries to attend. Trying to discover these new or lesser-known breweries via phone calls and the internet—and then taste their beers—is difficult.
“I would like to expand more in terms of [the diversity of] breweries and brewery ownership. That’s a place where we need to be able to get out again and find out what these new breweries are doing,” Lodge says.
The pandemic constrained beer festival organizers and attendees, just as it constrained many Americans’ social lives this year. But as gatherings now move tentatively forward, there’s an opportunity to reimagine beer events in a way that makes their reach broader, not more narrow. This is also a chance to ensure equity not just of access, but of profit.
“Events in general, the whole model—a lot of it is a scam. Very few people get paid off of these things,” Bracey says. “It seems like everybody’s trying to squeeze something out of everybody. It’s always been that way. It’s time to lead by example to say, ‘Yo, it doesn’t have to be this way.’”
Words by Kate Bernot