There’s been a festival gap for Brewery Ommegang and this year was the time to bring it back, said Jordan Egbert.
The New York brewery’s Brand Manager spoke with Brewer recently to share details in resurrecting the brewery’s popular event, “Belgium Comes to Cooperstown,” which is part beer festival, part concert, part bottle share, along with a bunch of other aspects that made it one of the most sought-after tickets in the mid-2010s.
“In the festival’s history, it sold out very quickly,” Egbert said on the August 20 edition of The Brewer Magazine Podcast, “it’s been a slower crawl, but we have momentum.”
Egbert said that with more options than ever, consumers need to feel like there is value in ticket prices. Being located in a remote part of New York, Ommegang has compiled pieces for this event to draw people not just locally, but from across the country. It will be the first BCTC since 2018. Initially, the brewery only planned to pause the event for a few years, but the pandemic slowed the re-emergence of the fest even longer.
“You have to get their attention to say, I’m gonna choose this. This is our weekend. This is what we’re doing,” he said. “I think the consumer is talking as we get closer, and you’re seeing the ticket sales rise. We’re seeing people, they’ve saved that calendar spot, and they’re committing towards it.”
Beginning on Friday, September 27, and lasting through the weekend, the brewery has on-site camping along with a VIP experience (which is sold out) for consumers to share rare beers with the breweries pouring on Saturday, followed by a four-hour beer fest with 30-plus hand-picked breweries that they wanted to highlight Belgium-styles that also includes T-shirt printing, a mobile zoo, disc golf, axe throwing, a pollinator education course along with other yard games. Live music starts at noon and goes into the night with an after-party DJ as well.
All of this, of course, takes months of pre-planning.
Egbert said some keys to planning include having your team identify the event’s key selling points, listening to feedback from consumers, and working closely with various stakeholders to make sure the event runs smoothly. They aim to balance creativity with feasibility, ensuring profitability without overspending.
“We take on the infrastructure and all the tasking and logistics that come with it,” he said. “We don’t need to go spend tens of thousands of dollars on one element just because it’s cool. We have to make sure that it’s going to work. A lot of that is rolling your sleeves up and saying, you know, I’ll build that activation piece myself. We’ll get the sawzall all out and go to Home Depot and all that.”
Egbert stressed the collaborative nature of the process, with regular meetings and shared documents to track tasks.
“It’s a ton of moving parts,” he said. “We have a couple shared documents that we can all get to, and so we can see the parts move as they go.
“I would recommend doing a Google Drive or something if you’re putting on a festival.”
READ MORE: What to do to Make a Killer Beer Festival Experience
He pointed out that using a combination of marketing strategies — like social media, newsletters, and traditional “guerilla” methods like distributing flyers — to build excitement have all been employed.
“We’re lucky in that there’s equity in the name BCTC, and people are really interested in it,” Egbert said. “We didn’t want to exceed too many tickets. We wanted to keep this small. I think that when we throw this off and it’s as successful as we plan it to be, it’s my hope that two, three or four years from now, people say, you know 2024 … that was incredible because it felt more intimate.”
The goal, he said, is to create an intimate, memorable festival experience, with careful planning to avoid overextending.
“This is our baby, and you get one chance to bring something like this back,” he said, “and that’s our plan. It’s to bring it back and let it continue to a new year.”
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