Lisa Williams expected to discover and drink new kinds of beer and interact with brewery representatives at this month’s Utah Beer Fest, like she had in years past.
Instead, she and many others that attended the first day of the two-day beer festival, held Aug. 16-17 at The Gateway, were left frustrated by an event that Williams describes as “pure chaos.”
Pete Saltas — publisher of the Salt Lake City Weekly and organizer of the publication’s Utah Beer Fest, held almost every August since 2010 — posted a statement on Instagram on Wednesday that read in part, “There are no words that can fully convey the depth of our regret nor the disappointment we feel that has been clearly expressed to us by many of you, particularly those who attended the [Utah Beer Fest] on Saturday afternoon. We are sorry for that.”
“This year was just a tornado of missteps,” Saltas told The Salt Lake Tribune.
Emphasizing that the first hours of the event’s first day were the worst, in an Instagram post from Saturday, Saltas described “a tale of two festivals,” one plagued by “heat, long lines and confusion” on Saturday afternoon, and one that had “laughter, shorter lines [and] cooler weather” by Saturday evening.
According to Saltas, City Weekly worked out most of the festival’s kinks by Sunday, which had “no line issues,” he said.
But at this point, the future of the Utah Beer Fest — billed as the largest beer event in Utah — is in jeopardy. And commenters on social media are questioning whether a “good” beer event can happen in Utah at all.
What happened at Utah Beer Fest?
Williams attended the Utah Beer Fest with her husband and parents, after taking FrontRunner from Ogden. They paid $42 apiece for tickets that would grant them the privilege of entering the festival an hour before it opened to the public at 3 p.m. Saturday.
She said they waited in line for about 10 minutes for the gates to open, before they got their IDs and bags checked, and received their punchcards for beer and cider, along with their 5-ounce sample mugs.
But once Williams and her group got inside, the bartenders turned them away, saying they had the wrong wristbands, and that even if they had the correct wristbands, they couldn’t serve them drinks until 3 p.m. anyway.
Williams and her party had to go back to the front entrance to try to sort out the wristband problem. She said they never saw any benefit from spending extra for early entrance.
Once they were served, they also found that the beer was being poured by third-party bartenders, not brewery staff who could tell them about what they were drinking. And the dozens of individual brewery booths that had been there in years past had been replaced by eight large communal bar tents.
With fewer access points to get drinks, “the lines got so incredibly long that you didn’t even know what you were in line for,” she said.
“You could just tell people were getting more and more irritated as the time went on,” Williams said.
Once she and her group were finally able to get drinks, their experience did improve, Williams said, but they ended up leaving at about 5:30 p.m., without using even half of the 10 punches available on their punchcards.
Unless organizers work to improve the event for next year, Williams said it’s unlikely she will be back. From what attendees have been saying on social media, she’s not alone.
“I think [Utah Beer Fest] is a fun event, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot in the past,” Williams said. “I think there was a real lack of communication, and that was a downfall this year, and I think they’ve lost a lot of patrons because of that.”
Overloading an ‘insufficient format’
Saltas told The Tribune that the biggest problems with the 2025 Utah Beer Fest stem from fallout from last year’s event.
Again held at The Gateway, the 2024 Utah Beer Fest was filled with “happy campers all around,” Saltas said, despite having rainy weather for both days of the festival.
But even though Saltas said he would describe the 2024 Utah Beer Fest as a “tremendous success,” City Weekly management got a nasty surprise a couple of weeks later, when they learned the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) had found the event in violation of state liquor law and the terms of its single-event permit.
According to documents provided by the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services (DABS), City Weekly’s parent company, Copperfield Publishing, was penalized for three violations at the 2024 Utah Beer Fest: a festival employee consuming alcohol while on duty; a patron having more than one alcoholic beverage at a time; and a patron receiving free alcohol.
On the three violation counts, each considered “serious” by the DABS, the highest possible total fine would’ve been $9,000, said Michelle Schmidt, spokesperson for the DABS.
But partly based on the fact that Copperfield Publishing had no prior violation history, it ended up having to pay fines last October totaling $4,000, plus administrative costs of $369.89.
Saltas said City Weekly/Copperfield Publishing doesn’t dispute the charges from last year, and that he saw evidence from SBI of the violations, including photos and video.
“We were probably more lax than we should have been in the last 14 years, and that’s why we had such a high exposure risk, and that’s why we got clamped down on pretty hard,” Saltas said. “I’m not blaming the DABS for giving me a violation.”
When planning started for this year’s Utah Beer Fest, Saltas said he knew he had to limit the “exposure” of the event and City Weekly and prevent more violations.
So he devised a new format for the festival, one that would turn 50 or so individual brewery booths into eight communal bar tents he called “cluster bars.”
In the days leading up to the festival, Saltas said City Weekly was seeing a 20% decline in ticket presales compared to 2024. He attributed that to multiple events happening the same weekend, people spending less and “people procrastinating.”
Using those presale numbers as a metric, “we felt like we had a good plan in place” with the new festival layout, Saltas said.
But on Aug. 16, the festival’s first day, organizers actually saw 10% more walk-up traffic compared to last year, Saltas said, and 80% of the total number of attendees showed up in the first 2½ hours. He attributed those higher numbers to the fact that the festival was seeing its first sunny weather in years.
The flood of people “overloaded an inefficient format,” Saltas said.
Event staff scrambled to help busier bar tents with the influx of attendees looking for beer, “but the people that were there for the first hour and a half truly did not have a great experience,” Saltas said. “That’s not something that we’re happy about at all.”
Cody McKendrick, a managing partner at Bewilder Brewing Co. in Salt Lake City and a third of the team behind Rabbit’s Foot Brewing Co. in West Valley City, said he’s gone to 13 iterations of Utah Beer Fest.
McKendrick described the new festival format as “frustrating,” saying it not only resulted in long lines, but that it also took away a part of what makes beer festivals meaningful for attendees.
“What has driven the craft beer community over the last 20 years is just that ability for the local consumer to connect with the local producer,” he said, “and it’s what gives people pride in what’s produced locally.”
Tim Chappell, who’s the brewer, owner and operator at Chappell Brewing in South Salt Lake, said his brewery may have been the only one at the festival actually pouring a product for attendees. Chappell Brewing makes a cannabis-infused hop water called Gateway, and Chappell and his staff gave out numerous samples both days of the festival.
“It was a great event for us to promote our nonalcoholic item,” Chappell said. “But we talked to almost nobody about our actual beer.”
Reflecting on the new format, Saltas said, “My biggest regret is I built this event out of fear of an elevated violation just one year after our last. ... That fear fueled an entirely different format that strayed from the original intent of the festival.”
In a statement, Schmidt said, “The DABS did not require or direct any format changes for this year’s Utah Beer Festival event. Any format changes were the sole decision of event organizers.”
“The DABS advises on requirements for alcohol-permitted events so that event organizers have all the accurate information needed to make their own informed decisions,” Schmidt continued.
Utah Beer Fest in 2026?
When asked whether Utah Beer Fest will happen next year, Saltas’ reply was, “Who knows?”
“If there’s not a format that works that I think that services the brewers and attendees alike, then it’d be really hard to put on the Utah Beer Festival again,” he continued.
McKendrick and Chappell both said they plan to enter their breweries in next year’s festival — if it happens.
“We’re pretty passionate about the beer being an important part of any community, and we want to be a part of that community, so we’ll always participate wherever we can,” McKendrick said.
Chappell said, “I’ll be curious to see what decisions they make going forward. And if the format’s exactly the same, we might go, but I’d be surprised if they have the same attendance next year if they don’t make quite a change and let the public know ahead of time.”
On the social platform Reddit, some commenters are saying that the Legislature and state liquor laws make it nearly impossible to organize beer festivals in Utah, and that beer lovers should go to states like Idaho instead.
Stephanie Biesecker, executive director of the Utah Brewers Guild, disagrees with that sentiment.
“We do have some pretty strict regulations in Utah, but we’re not the only state that does,” Biesecker said. “There are a lot of states that have really strict alcohol laws. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to plan [festivals], but it is possible.”
The Utah Brewers Guild puts on the annual Great Beer Mashup, where each guild member brewery partners with a member of the community to create a one-of-a-kind beer, cider, kombucha or other beverage that’s exclusive to the event, according to the guild’s website.
Biesecker said this year’s mashup, held in May at Woodbine Food Hall, “went over really well.”
And she listed Ogden Beer Fest, Snowbird’s Oktoberfest (happening now through Oct. 12) and the Deer Valley Mountain Beer Festival (happening Sept. 12-14) as some of the “great beer events” in Utah.
Jeffrey Carleton, owner of Mountain West Hard Cider, which sold cider and wine to the Utah Beer Fest, also said Snowbird’s Oktoberfest has “got it down.”
“You’re not drinking two or three ounces, you get a pint of beer that you choose, and you drink it,” Carleton said. “That’s the way an Oktoberfest should be. I think we’re scared of that, in a way.” (Carleton has attended Oktoberfest outside of Munich, and said with a laugh that the huge festival “would not work here in Utah.”)
By the way, Saltas said Utah Beer Fest is nothing like Snowbird’s Oktoberfest. Utah Beer Fest is a “sampling event,” he said, whereas at Oktoberfest, attendees are walking up to beer tents and purchasing full-size beers.
But no matter if beer fans are imbibing at the Utah Beer Fest or another beer-centric event, “we have some very good brewers here,” Saltas said. “We’ve got award-winning beers in Utah. They should be showcased.”
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