Yesterday the Austin Beer Fest was announced, and, based on a Twitter account bio for the festival that read "The Creators of the Houston Beer Fest brings the event to Austin," the original Eater story linked the two events. (The bio has since been changed — see the screengrabs at right.)
Problem is, the Houston event was not the greatest success, and it turns out the company running the Austin festival is not the same one responsible for the Houston disaster. So what's the deal?
One of the Austin Beer Fest organizers, Dexter Bayack, told Eater that while one of the partners of the company running the Austin event was a partner of the Houston festival as well, the two events are in fact run by different companies. (Details on what went down at the Houston Beer Fest on Eater Houston.) Below, Bayack answers a few questions about the similarities in the branding of the two festivals.
So the Twitter account for the Austin Beer Fest no longer says that the Austin event is from the creators of the Houston Beer Fest.
That's why we changed it, because we felt that would cause a lot of trouble with people actually trying to associate us with the Houston Beer Fest. Being that it said the creators, it didn't mean actually [Houston Beer Fest organizer] Timothy [Hudson] because there were actually a couple partners involved.
If you didn't want it to be affiliated at all with the Houston Beer Fest, why did you call it the Austin Beer Fest? Why didn't you change it up a little bit?
There was another site that had the Great Austin Beer Fest so the only name that was available was Austin Beer Fest. There was another beer fest in Austin last year that was the Great Austin Beer Festival. So we wanted somehow to be affiliated with Austin so [Austin Beer Fest organizer] Brent Villareal actually bought the domain name and okay we'll just call it the Austin Beer Fest. Basically for SEO reasons and a lot of other reasons. I thought it's a good name because it's marketable and as far as Google and SEO goes, I thought it's beneficial. We just didn't want it to be assumed and tied with the Houston Beer Festival.
If you had such a problem with [the Houston Beer Fest], why would you ever put that on your Twitter account? Even in the beginning?
Well basically because we figured since Brent was part of it — I put that. That was actually my doing. He didn't actually do that. I did that because I figured since he was actually a part of the event I would put that.
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