Untappd’s beer festival did not go well last year. But it’s back. Will it be better?
When it rained last spring on the inaugural Untappd Beer Festival at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, it poured. Both literally and figuratively.
So Monday’s surprise revelation — that the festival would be returning for another go on May 16 — will almost certainly be met with jeers, sneers and at the very least healthy doses of skepticism by many who attended last year’s Untappd event, which went so haywire and generated so many complaints that organizers say they wound up issuing about $120,000 worth of refunds.
We have details on the plans for the new-and-hopefully-much-improved 2020 edition of the festival, as well as lots of reflection on the 2019 edition from the president of Untappd, having now had nearly eight months to ruminate on it.
But before we get to that, a little background, for the uninitiated:
Untappd is a North Carolina-based software company (headquartered in Wilmington but with offices in Durham and Charlotte) that is best-known for putting out a social-drinking app that allows its millions of users to discover and rate beer. Last year, Untappd decided to make a maiden foray into the events business, following an invitation by the Carolina Panthers.
The company had just 2-1/2 months’ lead time, and since it had no experience staging events it opted to hire a third-party event-management company to produce the festival. Organizers crushed the run-up, recruiting an impressive 176 breweries and becoming the hottest ticket in town, selling out of all 12,500 available admissions in advance.
But as soon as the gates opened on that first Saturday in May, things started going unusually badly.
Lines leading into the stadium were obnoxiously long, in large part due to a shortage of event staffers checking IDs. Lines inside were long, too, for beer — it could take several minutes to get your small pour. On top of that, the promised “souvenir sampling glasses” turned out to be cheap plastic that cracked easily. (Untappd has said it was the fault of the vendor, which sent cups that the company didn’t order. Also worth noting here: About $10,000 worth of free glassware with the Untappd logo was sent, following the event, to those who had issues with the cups.)
Then came the rain, then came the lightning, then a delay. Many waiting in line outside bailed out. Those inside were forced from the field onto the concourse, where no beer was being poured.
Before long, Twitter was flooded with complaints, with miffed attendees likening it to the infamous Fyre Festival, the fraudulent 2017 event in the Bahamas that — less than four months before the inaugural Untappd fest — had been immortalized in dueling documentaries produced by Netflix and Hulu.
“We did this to promote the brand. Obviously, that backfired on us last year,” said Trace Smith, the 32-year-old Charlotte-based president and COO of Untappd. “Was it Fyre Festival? Of course not. There was cover. There were bathrooms. There was food. But did a lot of people not have a great experience? Yes. ... And we’re committed this year to making sure that the time that’s spent at the event is well worth the time investment, and the dollar investment.”
Most of the changes correlate directly with the “operational difficulties” the company said it experienced last year.
So for one, there’s a weather contingency plan. Last year, brewers set up their stations only on the field and in Lot 4 behind the stadium. Organizers were tracking the weather, but it looked like it wouldn’t be an issue until after the event, so they made the call that morning to keep them on the field. It turned out, obviously, to be a bad call.
This year, some brewers will be set up on the concourse from the start, and if there’s a surprise onslaught of inclement weather, Smith said there’s a solid plan for getting all of the brewers onto the concourse in a quick and efficient manner.
Number two, there will be two separate sessions for beer lovers on May 16 — one that starts at 11:30 a.m. and another that begins at 5:30 p.m. Each session will be capped at 8,000 attendees. Along with an increase in ID checkers, this should translate to shorter lines to get in, and once inside, to get a drink. Admission prices will remain the same as last year: $50 for general admission, $65 for early admission, and $200 for the “VIP experience.”
Thirdly, the cup issue has been resolved, Smith said, adding that they vetted about 20 different cups for 2020 before settling on Govino as the vendor. These new ones, he said, are good for 5-ounce pours, dishwasher-safe, and made of shatterproof plastic. “They are fantastic,” Smith said. “We’ve thrown them against walls and off the floor. They do not break.”
Smith also said new brewers and food trucks have been added to the mix, and that the VIP experiences have been “enhanced.”
But Smith feels the most significant change is this: After outsourcing production of the festival last year, Untappd hired its first-ever director of festivals and live events.
“I like a challenge,” said Talia Spera, who came on board in November after being hired away from her previous job, as executive director of entertainment at MGM Springfield in Massachusetts. “We’re a little bit of the underdog ... so I’d love to be able to bring it back and to really make the brand proud, by executing this festival well.”
Spera said that she has a huge advantage in that there is far more advance-planning time — that whereas last year, the organizers were just trying to get everything done by the day of the event, she and her team are “on the train of thought of, ‘How do we then bring it to the next level? How do we stick out among all the other beer festivals?’ So we’re really trying to figure out how to enhance that experience, whether it’s through brand activations, or entertainment, or our VIP lounge, or the new brewers’ (hospitality) lounge.”
And by the way, there was never any thought, Smith insists, of not giving it another try.
“We were pretty strong in our resolve to do this again. ... Look, we push software out to 8 million people pretty regularly, and we’re used to taking feedback and iterating to improve a product. But I think we definitely learned that live events is not software. When you’re in the physical world, you can’t just iterate and push new lines of code. What you can do is learn from what happened and make decisions that put you in a better place for the next event.”
He said Untappd will be producing two more to-be-announced new events in 2020 — one in the U.S. (but outside the Southeast) and another in Europe — but envisions the beer festival at Bank of America Stadium becoming the company’s marquee annual event.
Now he just has to hope the old saying isn’t true.
“But if lightning does strike twice,” Smith said, “we’re ready.”
Untappd Beer Festival details
The 2020 event will feature more than 150 breweries, including Birdsong, Legion, Olde Mecklenburg, Red Clay Ciderworks, NoDa, Triple C and Lenny Boy from the Charlotte Independent Brewers Alliance, and “many other Charlotte favorites.” Others committed — from beyond the area — include Botanist and Barrel, Breakside Brewery, The Bruery, Burial Brewing, Modern Times, New Anthem, Other Half, Upland Brewing, Urban Artifact and Wilmington Brewing.
When: Sessions at 11:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 16.
Where: Bank of America Stadium, 800 S. Mint St.
Tickets: $50 for general admission, $65 for early admission, and $200 for the “VIP experience.” The pre-sale starts at 10 a.m. Wednesday at www.ticketmaster.com; the “public sale” will begin at 10 a.m. Friday.
Details: untappdfestival.com.
One more thing — in case you’re thinking, Is security an issue? It seems like, with thousands of potentially intoxicated people running around, the potential is there for problems. In a statement, Untappd said: “We did not have any security issues last year, despite the weather evacuation that was needed. We work well with the stadium’s security vendor, who manages crowds of over 50,000 for their events and are confident in the staffing plan. We will have security, police and medical staff on site to respond to any issues.”
This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 8:30 AM.
