(Denver, CO) – At 12:20PM EST, the Great American Beer Festival Twitter account announced that Wednesday’s public sale on Ticketmaster sold out. Twenty minutes is the official sell-out time according to Brewers Association Sales & Marketing Director, Barbara Fusco.
Practically speaking, it is likely that all tickets were secured in a Ticketmaster shopping cart within a few minutes.
The Friday night session sold out first.
The mark sets another record for the event, beating last year’s sell-out of 45 minutes.
In 2011, the tickets sold out in ten days.
Tickets cost $75 each for the non-member sessions this year, an increase of $10 from last year’s price.
Fusco did not disclose how many tickets were sold on Wednesday.
49,000 people are expected to attend this year’s event.
Don’t be naive Adam. Go ahead and check out denverposts article (specifically the comments) last year: http://blogs.denverpost.com/beer/2012/08/02/great-american-beer-festival-tickets-record-time/5432/ These didn’t sell out in 20 minutes, they sold out in a half a second and 75% of the tickets were probably sold before 10am. People were reporting that ticketmasters own people on the phone confirmed sellout by 10:01. Others with insider knowledge are confirming that ticketmasters own scalpers were sold thousands of tickets at 8am and even though they claim you can only buy 4 tickets, scalpers were selling blocks of 60 on stubhub within 20 minutes.
Oh and the final nail in the coffin? Designated driver tickets never sell out. They have also sold out within minutes. The brewers association claims the fast sell out is due to a growing craft beer industry which makes perfect sense you know, because people were just dying to get in and smell the beer they can’t drink with DD tickets.
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They were gone within a minute. The worst part is the marketing by the BA exclaiming how happy they are that the festival sold out. What they forget to mention is that they sold craft beer out to scalpers and Ticketmaster.
and an hour later, 800 tickets were on Stubhub. BA needs to get with the times and require the purchasing credit card and ID in order to gain admittance for all of the tickets sold.