Austin Beer Fest Organizers Could Have Thrown Such A Great Party If Everyone Else Hadn't Ruined It For Them

Look, you guys. It's not the organizers of the Austin Beer Fest's fault that the beer festivals they plan repeatedly turn out to be PR nightmares! It's just that the event venue, the vendors, the guests, the breweries and the TABC are really bad at helping these guys throw beer festivals. If everybody else could just stop being so bad at their jobs, everything could have been great, instead of, by almost all social media reports, kind of awful. Via their official Facebook apology:

To bring that many beers to one location was going to take a massive effort, and would require all breweries, distributors, planners, and the city, to work together and cooperate for the greater good. To watch as arrogance, unprofessionalism, and unavoidable modifications made by others, slowly chew away at the most crucial of details in the idea is a feeling that is truly heart-shattering.

Despite the fact that everybody involved seems to want to pretend they're totally not affiliated with that other beer fest disaster, the Austin Beer Fest was at one point demonstrably proud to be brought to town by last year's Houston Beer Fest organizers. The two events appear to have been mirror-image failures, organized by a group of vaguely business-affiliated dudes who are getting really good at playing semantics with the words "organizer," "affiliate" and "involved." According to CultureMap, a number of them went in on a lifestyle website start-up together in 2009.

Organizer Greg Schoolfield told CultureMap Austin yesterday that he and his partners will host another fest next year.

· Austin Beer Fest Explains [Facebook]
· Austin Beer Fest instigates furor, finger-pointing [CultureMap Austin]
· All Austin Beer Fest [-EATX-]

[Photo: Austin Beer Fest/Official]