Student-led beer festival attracts thousands, but only a few hundred Scarfies

Jake Kenny Reporter from Community News

Turns out students are good at organising a beer festival.

Now in its eighth year, this weekend’s Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival should see 12,000 people pour through the gates of Forsyth Barr Stadium to sup on ale and cider and enjoy music from the likes of Don McGlashan and Ladi6.

Perhaps unusually for Dunedin, most of those beer lovers will not be students.

The festival is run by the Otago University and Students’ Association (OUSA), which launched it eight years ago on the concrete pad at Forsyth Barr as rain, wind and hail struck the roof.

“In those first couple of years, people were pretty nervous,'’ Jason Schroeder, OUSA’s events and venues operations manager admits.

That trepidation wasn’t entirely unfounded, with students’ alcohol-fuelled incidents attracting negative headlines.

Schroeder said for many it was difficult to understand why OUSA would put on a beer festival, which crucially was not aimed at students.

But word soon spread about the event, and by the next year the festival had encroached to a part of the grass, and then the year after reached the halfway line.

Within four years it covered the entire grass surface, and in recent years has become a two-day event, Friday and Saturday, with the former aimed at working professionals, Schroeder said.