Community Corner

Brew Fest Profit Nowhere Near Goal, but Still a 'Success,' Organizer Says

Unexpected costs, low ticket sales on day of the event hurt, but merchandise sales will bring in money, Steve Caton says. (Take our poll at the end of this story.)

numbers are still not final, but it’s possible the event won’t make a profit – at least not yet.

Organizer Steve Caton said miscalculated and unplanned costs coupled with a lower-than-anticipated ticket sales on the day of the Aug. 27 event have eaten into the money the fest might have made, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a success nor does it mean they won’t do it again next year.

And if they’re able to market the merchandise that wasn’t sold that day – T-shirts, baseball caps, beer glasses and other items – that money will go directly to the Plainfield Riverfront Foundation, the nonprofit group that was to be the beneficiary of money made by the Riverfront Park craft beer event, he said.

Find out what's happening in Plainfieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“Do I regret saying we were going to raise $40,000?” Caton said. “Absolutely not. … We think we’ve done an extremely successful event. We brought a lot of people to Plainfield who had never been to Plainfield before. We brought a lot of people to the riverfront.”

In hindsight, however, he said he does regret one thing: that his group presented a $14,000 check to the riverfront foundation before all of the event expenses had been finalized. As bills kept coming in and math errors were being reconciled, they realized they would need to ask for the money back, he said.

Find out what's happening in Plainfieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

None of the volunteers involved in the festival had ever pulled together an event of this magnitude, Caton said, and while they tried to plan for every contingency there were still a lot of things they didn’t anticipate. Almost everything had to be purchased or rented – fences, cash registers, portable rest rooms, banners – and when they ran out of ice, for example, they were forced to buy it from local stores at retail prices, he said.

The benefit of going through the experience once, however, is you not only have items you can use again next year, you have a better idea of what you’re going to need the next time around and how to get it less expensively, Caton said.

For example, there are companies that will drive a truckload of ice to a festival site and then charge only for what the event ends up consuming – at about a quarter the price of retail, he said.

There are other things they might do next year, too, such as charging for on-site VIP parking and doing more marketing to towns like Naperville, he said.

“(Unless you’ve done something like this), no one understands the magnitude of what’s involved,” Caton said.

Or the fine line between making a profit or not.

Wheaton held a craft beer fest a few weeks prior to Plainfield’s and sold 1,700 tickets on the day of the event, Caton said. Based on that, organizers thought they’d likely sell about 1,000 on the day of Plainfield’s fest – at $50 each – and would make a nice profit.

Instead, they ended up selling only 300, although nearly 2,700 people bought $40 in-advance tickets, he said.

They also expected to sell more merchandise than they did, he said. However, that’s the kind of thing they can continue to sell and, since it’s been paid for, all of the money will go directly to the riverfront foundation, which is raising funds to redevelop the park land along the DuPage River.

Items are being sold at www.midwestbrewersfest.com, with T-shirts going for $20, button-up shirts for $40, baseball caps for $15, beer sticks for $15, and commemorative glasses for $2 and $5.

Caton said he also wants to emphasize the entire event was organized using volunteers, some of whom paid for expenses out of their own pockets in faith that they would be reimbursed after tickets were sold. There’s a misconception, he said, that the paid for some of the expenses, such as the police protection, which is not true, he said.

“The village didn’t fund anything,” Caton said. “We wrote the checks for everything. Unfortunately we didn’t make our goal this year … but we still hope to donate some money when we get all of the accounting done.”


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here