Ballast Point 20th Anniversary Fest?

Who knows what it will be like. Ballast Point isn't even Ballast Point anymore. Soon after they sold the brewery the entire core of the company stepped down. That includes co-founder, COO and head brewer Yusuff Churney, Founder Jack White, President and CEO Jim Buechler, COO Earl Knight and General Counsel Julie Buechler. They were all replaced with Constellation Brands executives. RIP Ballast Point.

 

10 actual beers but 5 variants each.

 

50 beers, all of them are fruited Sculpin variants.

 

Did you know what all of those people ACTUALLY did for the day to day operations the past 3-4 years?

Not much.

 

Sure do. They built a company that sold for a billion dollars... that's gotta count for something

 

$70 for 10 tastings? Haha.

 

It's amazing how much I don't care about Ballast Point.

 

I work for Ballast point, and its business as usual for us. The upper management left to expand the Distillery side of the business. The new CEO is fantastic.

 

Its also a huge concert, with a bunch of great local bands and The Roots headlining it. Not bad for great beer and a great concert!

 

amazing

 

Wow, not so "Dedicated to the Craft" then after all. Lol.

 

Where's the partial beer list? I've lost enthusiasm for the beer side of Ballast Point over the years. I don't care about fruited versions of Sculpin or bad variants of Victory at Sea. The Roots are pretty awesome, though! I'd go just for them!

 

I'm in for the Roots. They're probably the only reason the wife agreed to go with me. I really don't mind watching the show while throwing down some Victory at Sea or Grapefruit Sculpin.

 

Since the venue they chose is the del mar race track there shouldn't be an issue with overcrowding. I just have a bad taste in my mouth from the year they held it down at the Embarcadero at the boats, specifically the Star of India. While the other boats were fun to walk around on and the sub was cool to go through, having to wait in line to get on the Star of India due to the amount of oversold tickets and then to wait in line to grab a beer on top of that just made it less than an enjoyable event.

I think I left with still a few drink tickets just because I didn't want to deal with standing around anymore. They fixed it later after they received enough complaints and offered a few free pints if you could make it to one of their locations, which I definitely took advantage of, but because of that....never again.

But that beer list looks nice, I would probably just camp out wherever they were pouring Sea Monster. I can bash them for selling out all I want but whenever I see Sea Monster hanging out on a shelf I still break down and buy it.

 

Wow, if it wasn't for The Roots, this would've been the worst festival I've ever attended. The lines were surprisingly worse then What the Funk 2015.

From the very beginning, the staff seemed confused about letting VIPs inside the fest at 4 pm, asking us "is it time to let you in?" There was confusion on where beers were located and which beers were being served. We saw a group of bagpipe players playing at the same time as a DJ blasting hip hop music, in such a way that you couldn't hear either of them that well. Just seemed disorganized and not well thought out.

I'm glad we had VIP because that was the only time where we could get beer easily. Once the General ticketed people arrived, there were gigantic 30+ min lines for every station, and most stations were serving pretty standard beers you could get at their brewery on a daily basis suck as fruited versions of Sculpin. They were selling cans for $12, which many people were busying out of sheer desperation to have any sort of beer in their hand.

The only 2 saving graces for us was that we were able to cash in 3 tix later in the day toward a 12 oz pour. Without that, we'd never have used up our tickets. And, the big one, for us, was The Roots. The Roots put on a great performance.

TLDR - The beer portion of the festival was awful, but the Roots portion was great.

 

That sucks. Compare that experience to the awesome anniversary party Stone throws every year.