Denver, September 2018 -- Great American Beer Festival winners celebrate their beer and brewery ... [+]
Following the disappointing news that Bavaria, Germany has cancelled Oktoberfest this year because of social distancing concerns over the coronavirus, the Brewers Association (BA) craft brewing trade organization announced Thursday that it will not host the nation’s largest beer festival in-person this fall for related reasons.
This would have marked the 39th Great American Beer Festival (GABF), held every year in Denver, near the BA’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Drawing 62,000 attendees and 800 breweries from around the country last year, the three-day beer tasting and education event has never been canceled before. A BA spokesperson says staff made the final decision Wednesday when Colorado governor Jared Polis authorized venues like the Colorado Convention Center – home of the GABF – for use as auxiliary treatment centers for COVID-positive patients.
Obviously, BA staffers and craft beer fans aren’t rejoicing in this decision, especially given that the BA has already canceled all three of its other top face-to-face events this year.
“As the world is still greatly affected by the spread of COVID-19 and will continue to be affected for the foreseeable future, we must … pursue other ways to host GABF,” says BA President and CEO Bob Pease in a statement.
Instead of canceling the festival completely, the BA will mirror the model it created for April’s Craft Brewers Conference by recreating the experience as creatively as possible online. The virtual GABF, scheduled for October 16-17 instead of its original September dates, will, as the BA writes in a statement, “likely include beer tastings, conversations with brewers, local brewery activations, and at-home beer and food pairing deliveries.”
The celebrated annual beer and brewery awards must go on, with more than 100 beer experts still expected to judge approximately 7,000 brews sent in from across the U.S. That will happen in-person under very controlled circumstances.
GABF’s “pivot,” as the BA calls it, comes as a strong economic blow to both the organization and to Colorado’s beer and hospitality industries. The BA hasn’t released ticket information yet for the repurposed party and didn’t provide information regarding previous or projected festival revenues. But by canceling all four of its signature events – GABF, CBC, Savor and HomebrewCon – it has missed out on most of the $16 million made last year on events, which comprise more than half of its yearly income. The BA has already laid off 23% of its staff, cut management salaries, frozen hiring and eliminated most travel, among other things, this spring.
More damaging to the American economy is the fact Denver’s tourism board reports GABF had a $35 million economic impact on the city of in 2019. That’s not counting money spent on visits to the 400 operating breweries that covered the rest of Colorado as of last July and made it the fourth most densely populated brewery state per capita, according to the Colorado Tourism Office. Further, the BA’s most recent statistics, from 2018, show craft beer makes more of a per-capita economic impact on Colorado than any other state.
Representatives from the Colorado Brewers Guild and Visit Denver referred inquiries to the BA.
Though they won’t converge on Colorado, tens of thousands of beer lovers can now virtually take part in GABF from computers around the world. The 74 online panels that replaced CBC from March to May drew approximately 12,000 participants from almost every country imaginable.
An independently run three-day virtual beer conference that stepped into fill the absence of CBC from April 20 to 22 brought 18,000 views from 75 countries to 40 presentations.
Organizer Andrew Coplon, who owns the Secret Hopper data collection service and hosted the conference on his Craft Beer Professionals Facebook page, says he’s invited the BA to stage GABF for free using the Virtual Taproom web platform he helped design for his own conference.
“My recommendation to the BA is to encourage fans to purchase from their local breweries then visit that brewery's Virtual Taproom. Attendees would have the opportunity to interact with that brewery's representative and other drinkers also enjoying beers from that brewery. Users are able to easily bounce from room to room, and this could replicate the GABF concept of tasting from each booth,” Coplon says.
A few other entities have programmed online beer festivals during stay-at-home orders, including Pennsylvania’s Sly Fox Brewing Bock Fest and Goat Races in mid-May and Britain’s Beer 52 bottle club, which claims 20,000 attended its fest in April and is planning a second round in early June.
