Update on festival partners and the venue for our event on Sunday 23rd October.

Hi Folks,

We have an update on festival partners and the venue for our event on Sunday 23rd October.

Last weekend we’ve been made aware that 2 of our festival partners (Vault City and Brewgooder) were collaborating with Brewdog’s Bars for this year’s Collab Fest (Brewdog Lothian Road and Brewdog Edinburgh airport). Both breweries have longstanding relationships with the local bars and expressed that the collaboration was in support of the local teams who work on a profit share model. 

Our views of Brewdog have always been the same from start, we’ve never worked with them and we’ve also always refused to sell our collab beers in their bars. Our values and theirs are more than incompatible and we are extremely strict on this.

On Monday we had a talk with Vault City and Brewgooder. For both it was important to support our message and not cause any distraction for the festival. We then took the decision to make a few changes and transfer the event initially planned at Porty Vault to another venue.

We’re going to be completely honest, Brewgooder is one of our Gold Sponsors and this close to the event we can’t afford to refuse any sponsorship without compromising the organisation of the whole festival.

We decided to keep their financial support but their logo won’t appear on any of our print materials and won’t be promoted on our social media and they won’t be participating on our panel discussion in order to discourage any negative distractions around the festival and preserve its positive aspect.

We had asked Brewgooder to be one of our sponsors because they always been very vocal about DEI values (Diversity/Equity/Inclusivity) and had started important work with their Work In Progress project, they had also committed to our Festival code of conduct.

After chatting with the guys, they has ensured us they are committed to do the right things in the long term and to keep supporting the festival and our actions.

Finally I wanted to say that when we selected them we asked all our venues to adhere to our code of conduct and support the Everyone Welcome Initiative. We always wanted this festival to be as safe and welcoming for all as possible and we intend to keep doing so.

Feel free to email us if you have any comment or questions about this, thank you for reading.