Hop Jam, a beer and music festival scheduled for August 19 at Bolton Valley, has been canceled, according to the festival organizer. Meg Schultz told Seven Days that she is calling off the event due to poor ticket sales. News of the cancellation was posted on the Hop Jam website.
Fewer than 200 tickets to Hop Jam had been sold as of Thursday afternoon, Schultz said. Last year at this time, 700 tickets had been sold — more than half of the 1,300 in total sales to the daylong festival, according to Schultz. She’d hoped to sell 1,000 tickets for this year’s event.
“The numbers are not encouraging,” she said. “There’s only so much debt I’m willing to take on, and we were way out of my threshold.”
More than three dozen breweries had been scheduled to participate in Hop Jam, with a handful of musicians slated to perform including headliner Kung Fu.
Headed into its fourth year, Hop Jam was held for two years on the side of Bolton Mountain before moving last year to flat land in the parking lot.
“We learned a lot from last year,” Schultz said. “We made a lot of adjustments.”
Schultz was unsure why sales were sluggish, though she suggested it was an industry-wide trend. The number of beer festivals is also increasing in Vermont and people are visiting breweries directly. Still, Schultz said she doesn’t think these factors fully account for the lack of sales.
“It’s like all of a sudden one plus one equals zero,” Schultz said. “The math just doesn’t add up. There’s some underlying reason that I just can’t figure out and it’s a shame. If I could figure out why, I’d change it.”
Tickets to Hop Jam were $40 general admission and $140 for a BIP (beer important person) pass, which included samples of 13 beers. Ticket holders will be refunded.
“I would’ve loved to continue,” Schultz said. “But I have to make a responsible business decision, and the right one was to cancel.”
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Just a guess, but it might be because tickets to this event have always been crazy expensive.
Ticket sales to every kind of festival are sluggish. And there are too many, packed into a short season. People have lots of options, and they wait to see how the weather will be. Resorts should look at these as ways to book rooms and keep facilities open, not as profit makers.
or instead of blaming “trends”, how about that last year was an absolute shit show that resulted in a social media backlash that the event supervisor tried to squash unsuccessfully. Obviously the majority has spoken and feels that their money would be better spent at more organized events where they actually get to drink the beer the organizer promises to deliver.
I don’t think that the reason is the many options out there. Theoretically this would be one of the best beer festivals out there. Great jam bands and top breweries on a Summer evening in Vermont… what beer fan in the Northeast doesn’t want that, hence the 1,300 ticket sales last year. The reason is that the event was so horrible last year that no one wanted to even take a chance this year. Trillium makes a beer each summer for the event called Headroom and it is one of their biggest releases of the year. This year Trillium was not even slated to attend this festival… that say’s something pretty loud to me. PEACE HOP JAM!
Too expensive
THEBEEBO8 & Alex Judge nailed it above. I attended all 3 previous editions of Hop Jam. Years 1 & 2 were awesome events, but last year was such a horrible shit show (due mostly to the fact that too many BIP tickets were sold given the limited amount of beer available for those ticket holders) that I vowed never to return. And Meg’s unfortunate inability to proactively address that problem going forward accounts for the weak sales this year. Had folks been assured that their BIP ticket would guarantee them pours of the special beers they were willing to pay for, then maybe they would have signed up again. Such a shame…I loved that event.