Four hundred dollars (plus taxes and fees). Each. That is how much my wife and I spent to get into the gates of the 2021 Kentucky Bourbon Festival (KBF). Now admittedly, we splurged for a VIP package. However, in a big departure from the previous 29 years, even if you didn’t splurge for VIP, you would need a general admission ticket to get onto the festival grounds. Which would cost you between $10 to $20 (plus taxes and fees) depending on how many days you wanted to attend. And if you could even get a ticket.
And those last two were very controversial in Bardstown. For a long time, this was a festival that was held in cooperation with the community. Each year, there were local craft vendors, food trucks, and family events in addition to the ticketed events where any drinking took place. It was a celebration of the local economy as much as it was of the product they were producing. People brought their kids, which might seem weird until you realize that this was basically a three-day company picnic for the locals that they invited the greater public to attend.
I’ve attended the KBF every year that it was held since 2012 with one exception. Which means I’ve been going for 10 years now. And every year I attended, I had people ask me “You here for the Bourbon Festival?” And then they would give me tips and chat me up. This year, if I heard a store owner or restaurant employee discuss it, it was only to say that they had no idea what was going on “over there.” Which made me sad because the intense community involvement was one of the many charms of attending the Festival. Of course, social media didn’t help as leading up to the Festival, there were numerous complaints about the new ticket policy. And there were also rumors of Festival social media employees reaching out via direct messaging to those who complained, with mean and disparaging comments about the complainer’s intelligence. And even if the rumors were untrue, they seem to have been believed leading to bad PR amongst the locals. Things seem to have gotten so bad between the community of Bardstown and the KBF, that the town set up its own celebration/festival for the same weekend.
So why all the changes? Well, as an attendee, I can attest that the festival was getting a bit stale. In fact, before they announced the changes, my wife and I had basically decided that unless changes were made that we wouldn’t be attending every year anymore. On top of that, one of the things that I’d heard over the years as I attended the Festival was that while they drew well in Bardstown, and they drew well from across the country, that they were having a hard time drawing Kentuckians from outside Bardstown. People from Louisville, Lexington, etc just didn’t really come. I’ve also heard from craft distillers over the years that it was becoming no longer worth their while to get a table at the events. That their small marketing budgets were better spent in other, more niche events that would draw differently. To fix all of this, or at least combat it, the festival hired new people to run the thing. And they completely reimagined what the festival could be.
And what they decided the Festival could be was a (capital W) Whiskey Festival, just like any other Whiskey Festival held on the planet. Gone were the family-friendly distillery booths selling company merchandise. Now they were distillery booths selling small pours of bourbon or cocktails. Gone were the food trucks, well except for a taco truck and an ice cream truck. Gone were the numerous vendors of local crafts. In were a much smaller number of vendors from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida. Gone were the kids, replaced by Bottle Bros™ standing in line to get a bottle of bourbon picked by Justins’ House of Bourbon that they were planning to flip. You could tell because, as you walked by the line, you could hear them comparing how much they were hoping to get for them. Not that everyone in line was a Bottle Bro™ but enough were that they were hard to ignore. In my opinion, I think the Festival lost a bit of its charm. It needed to change in order to survive, but maybe not quite that much.
Now, as I said earlier, I paid extra for a VIP experience. I bought the Flask Force 3-day pass for my wife and I. So what did a person get for that extra $380? First of all, as the name suggests, you got a flask. A very nice hand-made copper flask from Jacob Bromwell. You got a KBF exclusive bottle of Maker’s Mark Private Select. I tasted mine and it was really good. You got a cut crystal Glencairn glass with the Festival logo engraved on it. A nice glass if you like Glencairn glasses. You got $25 worth of drink tickets for the lawn plus access to the 3rd floor “VIP lounge” in Spalding Hall where there would be free drinks and pours offered. You got a ticket to the Thursday night Bourbon in the Air event which replaced the All-Star Sampler of previous years. You got a ticket to one educational event on Friday and one on Saturday. Plus little things like a challenge coin, a t-shirt, a poster, and access to a VIP Party Deck. All in all, not too bad. Not too bad at all.
The problem wasn’t necessarily the idea, it was the execution. Mass confusion reigned amongst the attendees and employees. What follows is my experience and those of Festival goers and employees that I talked with. And yes, as I had purchased tickets for classes as well as VIP tickets, this will focus heavily on the things I experienced.
I’m going to start with the good things. I’m just going to do this list style for clarity.
I really liked that they had a vaccination requirement to attend the Festival. You showed your proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test from the last 72 hours and you were allowed in. If you had neither, there was a rapid testing station near the entrance.
The classes I attended were world-class. I had tickets to a blending class led by Brent Elliott, Master Distiller of Four Roses where you got to blend your own Small Batch using the finalists of the Elliott’s Select Single Barrel from a few years back. (I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post since my wife and I made such different blends that we want to talk about them more and the process we used to come to them.) I also had tickets to a class on aging led by Dr. Pat Heist, cofounder of Wilderness Trail and a barrel chemist named Andrew from Independent Stave (I admit, I was so busy listening that I forgot to write Andrew’s name down). Both of these were extremely informative and fun. The aging class was the most detailed, scientific class on bourbon making that I’ve ever attended. I was enthralled from start to finish. Just fantastic. I said they were world-class and I meant it.
Now the not-so-good things. This was possibly the worst executed event that I have ever attended. And it all comes down to communication. Once again, list style.
To begin with, a couple of days before your event, you were given an instructional email on how to get into the Festival and get your credentials. Between the time that email went out and the Friday start of the Festival, the process changed without notice. Instead of showing your ticket to get into the reserved parking and walking to the VIP area to get your credentials, you got the credentials when you pulled into the reserved parking. Which was great if you drove there but much less so if you were staying in town and walked.
Once you were on the grounds and had your credentials, if you were like me, you needed to find your first class. That was easier said than done since the tent name on the maps and the tent name on your ticket were not the same and the employees working the Festival didn’t know where anything was if it didn’t immediately affect the job they were working. I asked three of them before I found someone who knew where the classes were being held. Luckily they had placed a musical performer right outside the tent so it made the classes super hard to hear at times.
Even though the Festival didn’t seem to be very well attended there were still very long lines.
The VIP bar offered about 5 or 6 cocktails. All but two of them required sour mix…and they were out of the sour mix at 3 pm Friday.
There was a lack of confidence among the attendees I spoke with. They were very confused about what tickets they had and didn’t have, where they were supposed to be, and they lacked confidence that the swag they were promised would be there when they tried to pick it up.
Annnd…that confusion was well placed in a few ways. Right when we arrived, we noticed that there were many people with tickets that would have given them swag that were left off of lists for said swag leading to confusion among the employees as to who got what. Most of those employees went off-script to make it right by the guest, but in talking to them you could see the frustration. There was also a lot of confusion as to where all that swag actually was located. As a personal example, I tried to pick up my bottle, poster, and t-shirt after my classes since my first class was right after the gates opened. By that point, I was told by the lady working at the Justins’ House of Bourbon booth (which was where you needed to pick up your bottle) that they were out and I’d need to come back tomorrow or go “upstairs” to take it up with the folks up there. So I did. You could tell that the poor guy working the info desk up there was beyond frustrated with how things were going, but he remained pleasant and got to work trying to find out how to help us. Eventually, he located the people who had locked up the bottles and someone was able to help us. We were told that we’d be in a similar boat if we tried to redeem the poster voucher as those had been sent to the Bourbon Outfitters Lexington store and not the Festival. However, they were delivered by the time we tried to pick them up. The t-shirt was no problem. It was the only thing that worked smoothly.
So if things had gone smoothly? If the people running it hadn’t shown an almost comical lack of competence from the planning stages onwards? Sure, it would have been an ok event. Not for me, but ok for those who are just there to get, and flip, an exclusive bottle and/or drink bourbon all day long. But for me? Well, I liked the educational aspects, each of which cost extra if you didn’t have the package I had (and even then I paid for my second class because there weren’t any I wanted to attend on Saturday). I guess, at the end of the day I can sum it up best by saying that I bought a three-day ticket for $400 and I opted to go for one day. They took a charming event that you could duck in and out of while traveling the local distilleries and towns and turned it into one large bar that would occasionally have educational classes. And ultimately, I found the new Kentucky Bourbon Festival boring. I’d used my drink tickets (mostly on a delicious non-alcoholic Hibiscus Lemonade), I’d attended the classes I had tickets for, and I was too bored to go back the last two days of the festival. Needless to say, as it will be held the day after my 25th wedding anniversary next year, I won’t be attending in 2022. And if this is the shape of the Festival going forward, I may not attend another one for quite a while. If you went and had fun, this post was not intended to negate your experience. But I feel like I am no longer the target audience. A celebration of the making of bourbon has become, aside from a few of the classes, a celebration of the consumption of it. And that makes me more than a little sad.
