UnTapped beer festival at BOA is a disaster

[L-TownCat]

Sorry, I was planting peach and pear trees, blueberry bushes, and such.  

 

What'd I miss?

Beer sounds good, who wants one?

[kungfoodude]

19 hours ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I told y'all this would suck.

It's just impossible to do a huge beer festival and not have the waiting in line to actually drinking beer ratio to be badly lopsided in the wrong direction.

That is why a lot of the festivals try to limit the amount of people and not sell 10-15k tickets. If you want to do that many people, make it a 2 day festival with multiple sessions. 

It also didn't help that Untappd went with an organizer that did not have much experience(if any) with beer festivals in general. That much appears to be clear. 

[kungfoodude]

12 hours ago, Jeremy Igo said:

Just sifted through all the tweets.

 

If you run a beer festival in which tickets were presold and you know how many people were attending yet you find yourself passing out the tiny cups the stadium usually put cheese in for nachos...

 

Yikes.

 

Panthers won't be associating themselves with this again .

Untappd will also not be able to get a lot of the breweries to participate again, no matter where they hold it. I have heard that from a few of the breweries that participated. 

[kungfoodude]

10 hours ago, Paintballr said:

Couple things I could see go wrong with this as I didn’t go...but didn’t go because of this. 

Its at BoA stadium. Cool idea in practice, but anyone bitching about not being able to bring a purse etc when you’ve never been able to bring it to the stadium for games is stupidity on their own part. The idea of the stadium is nice as it’s large, but only utilizing the actual field is bad. You have Lower and upper concourses that weren’t used. I wonder why? You can’t say that traffic or flow would cause that because I was there for the draft party and it was not efficient having one way up and down on the field. 

NC has some ass backwards alcohol laws. Even though this is a “craft” beer festival, some of these breweries are distributed by other companies and those companies actually do these events for the brewery. Wicked Weed, Sierra Nevada, Devils Backbone, AMB, Catawba, Green Man etc are all distributes by Adams, Empire, and other companies. If I want my beer poured by guys or women who don’t know poo about their product and solely are hired off looks, I don’t want to try it. Plus, the brewery isn’t really getting anything from this, they are the middle man. If you truly want to support the brewery go directly there. All that is caused by the laws we have where if they distribute a certain amount, a 3rd party company has to do it for them. Although I’m not the biggest fans of OMB and NoDa, I appreciate them wanting to keep that control. 

 Which leads to the other issues. Untapped has to work through those distribution companies for this event, not the brewery (unless it’s a small brewery) no matter if untapped has everything planned, if that company (Empire or Adams etc) shows up late, doesn’t bring enough kegs, doesn’t setup fast enough etc. untapped gets the flack not the distribution company. 

 Now, Untapped fuged up by not ordering enough cups. That’s totally their marketing team and would expect people to lose their job come Monday. They legally can’t give you normal pours for $50. It has to be a certain oz cup or less to prevent “bros” from getting completely trashed in the first hour. Anyone expecting a bigger cup are dumb. 

This beer festival would have been great 10 years ago with our breweries first starting and needing advertising, but it’s 2019. The market is huge, and there are no benefits for small companies to do events like this when the big dogs who use distributors will get first dibs. 

  

That's not necessarily true. The three tier system is something that most states have to deal with, not just NC. It's pretty common to have to distribute via a licensed distributor. Plus, NC also allows self distribution(under a certain volume of beer produced per year). Distribution companies do suck in terms of representing the beer sometimes. I have seen good reps and bad reps at festivals so that does vary. There are benefits to doing these events, especially when the market is so competitive with the flood of microbreweries. Not everyone at these festivals is scouring the aisles of every bottle shop to find the newest breweries, nor trying every new tap at the local beer bar. This is a good way to get exposure if you DO distribute/self-distribute and potentially get interest from new customers if you are a local brewery.

It sounds like Untappd had an organizer that was not familiar with beer festivals and they didn't really know how to run one efficiently. 

[jasonluckydog]

Well to be fair on the purse it was a large purse...

[RumHam]

Drink pbr like real men

[LinvilleGorge]

7 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Drink pbr like real men

Last I checked, you needed to be wearing skinny jeans while rocking a man bun and a waxed mustache to drink PBR. It's THE hipster beer.

[Zaximus]

Maybe a beer festival wasn't the best way to open the stadium to more events.     Maybe start out with a concert or something?   

[CatMan72]

5 minutes ago, Zaximus said:

Maybe a beer festival wasn't the best way to open the stadium to more events.     Maybe start out with a concert or something?   

So when they shut it down for lightening people can bitch about that LOL

[Dex]

22 hours ago, Cookie Lyon said:

So tacky.

What do you expect? It's the south.

[App Panther]

8 minutes ago, Zaximus said:

Maybe a beer festival wasn't the best way to open the stadium to more events.     Maybe start out with a concert or something?   

Or some playoff home games.

[PanthersATL]

According to panthers.com, uptapped "served up fun".

https://www.panthers.com/video/uptapped-beer-festival-serves-up-fun

[zacka77ack]

On 5/5/2019 at 8:28 AM, Panthro said:

Queen City Brewers Festival does it right

Known # attendees

Lots of breweries

2 sessions midday and afternoon

Quick question, and please excuse my ignorance but what is the difference between "midday" and "afternoon" ?

[CatMan72]

I get people with early admission are annoyed by the brewers not being ready to serve and having to shelter in the concourse for an hour because of lighting, but the level of outrage is ridiculous... actually saw an article suggesting it was the Fyre of beer festivals. 

I was there, yes it sucked that the early admission people couldn't get a beer right away and yes it sucked to stand in the concourse for an hour and change with nothing to drink, but they extended the event by an hour and I ultimately had a great time (and a hangover).