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Hey there, friends of GABS and fellow craft beer lovers,

We hope you’re all keeping safe and managing the current crisis as best you can. As you can imagine, the events industry has been thrown into turmoil in recent times, with cancellation after devastating cancellation, as the world grapples with the impact of COVID-19. We completely support the measures taken to limit the spread of the virus, and want to be part of the solution. Our primary concern is ensuring the health and safety of all event attendees, exhibitors and staff.

Here’s what we’re doing…

Postponing our Australian festivals
Behind the scenes, our team has been working hard with venues, partners and the many great breweries involved to find a way to keep GABS on the calendar, and at a time when it will be ok again to get together with friends over a beer. We’re pleased now to announce new dates for all of our Australian events as below. And we’re working on the best possible dates for GABS Auckland as well (to be announced as soon as we can).

NEW TOUR DATES

GABS Melbourne
Friday 7 – Sunday 9 August
Royal Exhibition Building

GABS Sydney
Saturday 29 August
Sydney Showground

GABS Brisbane
Saturday 26 September
Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

GABS Auckland
Currently Saturday 4 July (subject to change)
ASB Showgrounds

All tickets already purchased for our Australian events are now automatically valid for the new dates, including Season Passes for GABS Melbourne (which sold out in record time). Session times remain the same. If for any reason you can’t make it on the new event date, you can transfer your ticket to another GABS event or session (find out more on that here) or give it to a friend. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at contact@gabs.beer.

It’s no secret that it would help the event and its team out a lot if you can hang onto your tickets, so as a special treat and thank you from us, all ticket buyers for the original dates will score themselves a 25% discount on all GABS merchandise (redeemable at the events).

Implementing improved health and safety measures

Regardless of the status of the COVID-19 virus at the time of the events, we’ll also be implementing a range of measures to improve health and safety, including:

Including messaging in our email marketing and ticketing platforms to advise ticket holders not to attend should they feel unwell (with full refunds offered).

While we do clean and reset each venue between sessions, we’ll be working with our cleaning supplier to bring in additional resources and thoroughly sanitise each venue.

We will be installing hand soap / sanitizer with paper towel alongside all water troughs throughout each festival to encourage hand washing.

We will put together a range of procedures for exhibitors to follow to reduce the likelihood of transmission, including wash kits, sanitizer, bar cleaning, gloves and more.

If deemed necessary closer to the time, we may sadly have to swap the iconic GABS Festival Glass for single use disposable plastic cups, and drop our ‘rinse and reuse’ program for tasting cups.

Of course, this is a rapidly evolving situation, and we greatly appreciate the support of all our GABS fans, partners and exhibitors during this period. We’ll keep you posted as we go along, and we look forward to seeing you for our tenth year celebrations at GABS 2020. I reckon by then, we’d all enjoy a beer. 😉