The Big Pour, a new beer festival sponsored by Valley-based Draft magazine, debuted Saturday at Hohokam Stadium in Mesa.
Organizers expected as many as 10,000 people to attend the afternoon and evening sessions. By my estimate, though, the mid-afternoon crowd — at least during the 90 minutes I was there — was well under 2,000.
Still, for a first-year event, The Big Pour seemed very well-run. Parking was a breeze, and appproximately 100 vendors offered brew samples.
There also were plenty of activities — darts, ping-pong, pool and foosball, just to name a few — as well as a stage for live music, a radar-measured baseball throw and food vendors.
Check out the goings-on (click any photo to enlarge):
Twitter
Facebook
Would have loved to attend but the $35. fee to get in was to me a bit excessive.
agreed on that. I am not a beer fan..but would have liked to walk around and see the sights. but not for 35 bucks. Nice idea, bad execution.
yeah - the 10,000 count was optimistic. I was at the evening session and there were probably 1,000 - 1,500. But the event was barely promoted. I heard about it from this website only two days before. Back in Tempe that night at Casey Moore’s no one we talked to had heard about it.
Still, my pals and I had a great time. It was well run, having beer games there made it so much more fun, and there was an amazing selection of beers. I know DRAFT is looking to roll this out in other cities. My feedback to them:
- Location, location: Hohokom Stadium was nice, but not really prime for your target market.
- Make VIP special: it was too far from all the fun on the field, the food was cold hot dogs and hamburgers, and the servers couldn’t tell me the most basic things about the beers.
- If you want to promote your mag, have stickers for the masses, banners all over the place, swag for VIPs, etc. for visibility.
- Create a score card so people can track the beers they’ve tried.
I hope they keep the concept going. I’d like to see it evolve!
I paid for the VIP package, was let in 45 minutes early as advertised and was promptly refused beer service in the VIP section. Hopefully, the organizers learned something about organizing (It’s top to bottom) from this initial event. I go to 4 or 5 beer fests a year and purchase VIP entry. This was by far the worst value for money of all but one of the festivals I have been to in the last five years.
Now this is not to say I had a bad time. It’s not like a bad round of golf for the same price. After all, there was good and great beer and a sunny mild day. Uwa’s cask IPA rocked.