Last drinks called for Adelaide’s Beer and BBQ Festival

A popular Adelaide festival is ending after a decade as the cost of living crisis claims another hospitality event.

The Beer and BBQ Festival has served more than 150,000 patrons in its 10 years. Picture: Ben Clark

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A popular Adelaide festival is ending after a decade as the cost of living crisis claims another hospitality event.

More than 150,000 people attended the Adelaide Beer and BBQ Festival, which supported at least 400 brewers and other small businesses, since its start in 2015.

But this year’s event at the Adelaide Showgrounds, which cost an estimated $1m to manage, will be the last after organisers announced its cost had increased between 30 and 40 per cent since 2022.

Gareth Lewis and Aaron Sandow were the founders of the event. Picture: Morgan Sette

The “hundreds of cumulative reasons” that contributed to rising costs included venue hire, paying concert artists, providing cleaners and amenities such as toilets as well as dealing with an “ever-increasing” beer excise taxes.

Last year they took a more than $60,000 hit after abandoning charging site fees.

Founders, Gareth Lewis and Aaron Sandown, who are involved in multiple other events, said they could not “see a way forward” for the event “in the current landscape, in its current format”.

They said they were “looking down the barrel of a significant financial loss that, when combined with previous year’s losses, means that it just isn’t sustainable”.

“Our punters are loyal and bloody amazing, but we can’t continue to pass the costs on to you, you can’t afford them, and we can’t afford to absorb them,” they said in a statement titled “last drinks”.

They warned that while Covid hadn’t defined this festival, it forced a move from the Brick Dairy Pavilion to the adjacent “more event-friendly” Showgrounds and since then it has been “very tough”.

“Festivals all over Australia have collapsed, brewers who have been with us from the start have fallen into administration, many have never recovered, and our hospitality friends are being put through the ringer weekly,” they said.

The beer festival organisers warned of more major publicly funded events than ever before in SA, which made it hard for independent festival brands to compete on a level playing field but thanked the state government for its support.

They urged patrons to support the event this year for the “best party of the past decade”.

Last year the Harvest Rock was cancelled.