Saturday, June 12, 2021
Beer Festivals Are Back. Here is How One is Pulling That Off.
The Vail Craft Beer Classic is coming back for its second straight year of socially distanced drinking with limited crowds in just two weeks. But the moves it's making to stay safe and relevant this year may impact the way that it and a whole lot of other beer festivals change permanently.
Unless you were one of the 700 people spread across four sessions who attended the event in 2020, you may not realize there was actually one beer festival last summer. Organizers cut capacity crowds by 82%, eliminated lines at booths for the sake of keeping groups of attendees apart and reported zero transmissions of coronavirus at a time when most people still were hunkering down in their homes.
They expected to put the same safety measures in place this year but have been pleased to see a loosening on everything from mask requirements to crowd constraints. Still, Team Player Productions is limiting each of the four sessions on June 25 and 26 to 250 people, even in a park that holds about 1,000, and it believes it may have hit on the sweet spot of attendee comfort and crowd optimization.
Kristen Slater, event director for the Denver-based organization, noted that while many festivals run on a ratio of one brewery for every 50 people, the Vail Craft Beer Classic will offer one beverage provider for every eight to 12 attendees. While guests this year will be able to sample the beers at the booths where they're poured — something they couldn't do last year, when they had to remain masked and take them back to designated areas for each cadre of attendees — she expects lines won't grow more than two to three people long, and the vibe will be very relaxed.
"That's really a decision we made early on that we didn't want that environment," Slater said of the typical throngs converging on the most sought-after booths. "And people loved it and they loved not having the pressure of having to get your beer and move to the next line."
This year, to meet all guests where they are on their public-mingling comfort levels, the festival will offer reusable taster cups if they want to take them from booth to booth or will offer compostable single-use cups and frisbee trays that attendees can use to gather the cups and bring them back to their stations. The festival will take place in Ford Park and Sculpture Garden, and there will be the usual trappings of a beer festival as well, including music.
And, yes, there will be 40 breweries, with a mix of Colorado star players (WeldWerks, Odell, Great Divide, 4 Noses) and local finds that would make you want to travel into the mountains for the weekend (Vail Brewing Co., Ramblebine, Cabin Creek, Baker's Brewery). And the pour list is not, well, poor, offering treats from WeldWerks' Pop-Rocks-inspired Rockets Red Glare Sour to Cheluna Brewing's Rojo Tamarindo Gose to a Chardonnay-barrel-aged saison from Cabin Creek.
By keeping ticket prices relatively close to 2019 levels — $64, with tickets available still to the 2 and 5 p.m. Friday sessions and a small wait list building for the noon and 3 p.m. Saturday sessions — and crowds small, Slater believes the whole festival will feel like the uncrowded but higher-priced VIP sessions of other events. Plus it will have a special touch — West Vail Liquor Mart will have QR codes at the booths of each of the breweries whose products it has in stock (about two-thirds of them), and attendees can order those beers for post-festival pickup or delivery if they would like.
Organizers certainly look forward to welcoming in more guests in future years. But Slater, for one, doesn't think that the elbow-to-elbow festivals of pre-pandemic times will return fully at any point. And these less crowded, more experiential gatherings that are taking place this summer may just offer a peek into how beer events will be redefined in future years.
"I think we're kind of going to see a hybrid. I think there is a knee-jerk reaction to big crowds for some people," Slater said. "But we're also seeing that people are willing to pay more for an elevated experience."
Labels: 4 Noses Brewing, Baker's Brewery, Beer festivals, Cabin Creek Brewing, Cheluna Brewing, Great Divide, Odell Brewing, Team Player Productions, Vail Craft Beer Classic, Weldwerks Brewing
