Beervana

Beervana attracts craft beer lovers from all over New Zealand and beyond.
This epic festival is now held in the Westpac stadium corridors. This means there is a lot of space for impressive, large stalls and entire food trucks and beer trucks to drive in. But that also means the concrete venue is totally lacking in atmosphere and soul.
The craft beer is good quality and both the brewers and punters are passionate and beardy. Beervana now uses scannable wristbands pre-​loaded with money to pay for all of the samples. A benefit to this is that you can get the money left on your wristband back at the end, so you don’t have to try to calculate exactly how much you think you will spend in a session.
A big surprise for me was the hefty price tag. The ticket prices were very high compared to other beer and spirit festival I’ve attended. Also, there was essentially nothing included with the ticket, other than entry. There were no initial tasting tokens and as for the «entertainment,» there was one small stage that wasn’t visible from a majority of the festival. The performers I saw were tolerable, but certainly didn’t come close to justifying the ticket price.
I’m cool with a higher cost of admission if there are free samples, tasting tokens included, or far more value for money with extras & entertainment. If I’m paying for all of my samples with no added extras, that’s okay too, but I would expect a low entrance fee. It makes me wonder if some locals would be better off just spending what they would have on the entrance fee on pints at one of quality craft beer bars around town instead?
There’s a great buzz at Beervana and in the craft beer bars around Wellington during the festival. I had an excellent time and some fond memories from the event (along with a few hazy ones)! Beervana is both pricy and a lot of fun.