San Diego Beer and Music Festival

What a disappointment!
Thank goodness we bought cheap tickets on craigslist and didn’t pay full price or even the still pricey groupon price that our friends paid.
We love beer fests and have been to many of them over the past few years. Unfortunately, they have been increasingly oversold to make a big profit leading to many problems. Long lines were the first of them here. The lines were so long that you literally had to stand in a line, get your beer, get in the next line and do it all over again. In case you didn’t get the picture, you were more than done with your beer from the last line before you were even half way through the next line. An hour and a half before the event was over vendors started running out of beer. It was chaos as one beer vendor was depleted and the line disintegrated into crowds of people running to the next line. This kept happening as more and more vendors ran out. At this point we went to the food trucks to grab a bite and half of them were closed while the others were out of at least half their menu items. On top of it all, the bathroom lines were horrendous.
The live music was really the only redeeming factor of the event. Save your money and go to a bar with good craft beers and live music. It’s clear the organized poorly planned and were only interested in making money. Bummer!

The event was terribly organized. There were not nearly enough toilets; people had to wait over 30 minutes. There were insufficient food vendors with the result that the vendors quickly ran out of food (and others told me they waited over 40 minutes). The queues for beer were extremely long. Many of the volunteers/​staff who were pouring beer new almost nothing about beer, which is crazy at a craft beer festival. For example, one lady told me that she was pouring an IPA and an ale. When I asked what type of ale she got very confused. Ales encompass an enormous range of styles, including the IPA on her other tap. Nevertheless, I had fun. But I think that had more to do with the great people I was with than anything about the festival.