Adelaide’s Beer & BBQ Festival has announced its return across July 10th an 11th, 2026. After a decade at the Adelaide Showground they’ve found a new home at the historic venue, The Drive.
To fit this massive stage they’ve booked one of their biggest genre-spanning line-ups yet. At the top of the bill are the iconic TISM, American singer-songwriter Ben Kweller, art rock supergroup Tropical Fuck Storm, and the next generation of hardcore SPEED.
This announcement comes after Beer & BBQ Festival announced the 2025 event would be “The Last Time… as you know it”. A statement from the festival mentioned this was in part due to the changing festival landscape and it becoming “an increasingly difficult industry to survive in”.
Most assumed this meant the festival would return in some form, but in a smaller capacity in the future.
To see a return to a full-scale multi-day festival less than a year later is a wonderful surprise for South Australian music, beer and barbecue lovers.
“I think the idea is it'll drive a more mainstream event than ever,” states Beer & BBQ Festival co-founder Gareth Lewis about this new iteration of the event.
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“We've spent a lot of years kind of playing around the edges [of the mainstream]. It’s in the middle of the city, right? Everyone's walked across the footbridge to go to the football and it's a known quantity so it seems a little bit safer. Even though we've ended up booking a typically weird and loud line-up. It just seems like there's less moving parts than there was before.”
Although the move to The Drive may seem like a step up from the previous space at the Adelaide Showground – in terms of capacity and production – Lewis shares that it’s a move that is more economically viable for the future of the festival.
“It made money at certain points of that decade [2015 – 2025],” he reveals. “It was never a big cash cow, but it got to the point where in that format and with all those inputs that it had – it just couldn't. We couldn't make a budget work.
“We're an independent business and that's what we did for a living and our wider business we run live music venues and hospitality and work on other people's festivals. We totally get that and we just couldn't continue to fund a vanity project for want of a better term.
“This model hopefully gives us the ability to make it sustainable financially and also be able to put a bit more money back in the pockets of the brewers who exhibit at the festival.
“It's a really unique festival model,” Lewis continues. “The festival doesn't break even just off ticket sales. It breaks even off all of the bar inputs [revenue from brewers and drinks] and the barbecue chefs that are there exhibiting. Without them, we don't really have a festival.”
Normally for similar festivals of this size, the event would start planning about a year in advance.
At Beer & BBQ discussions for future years would happen right after the previous festival had finished. With the change this year, it meant discussions only started late last year once they had the venue locked in.
“It kind of gave us a bit of a new lease on life,” Lewis shares. “Because now we've got a big stage, there's a great amazing outdoor stage at The Drive which gets criminally underused most of the year.
“We can book things that we wouldn't have been able to book at the Showground before just because of the limitation of the space we were in.
“We sort of started to aim high. I've been booking line-ups for over a decade now, for this festival and well over that for other festivals. You scatter bullets everywhere and you see what hits.
“This line-up feels like a really true Beer & BBQ line-up but it's not something we could have done at the Showgrounds,” he adds. “Like the TISM show is physically too big to fit where we used to be.”
Beer & BBQ Festival at the Adelaide Showground had the main stage in an outdoor area while the brewers and barbecue were mostly spread out across the venue further away from the stage.
The move to The Drive with the available space in front of the main stage was a crucial part of the decision to move.
“It's kind of like a new toy to play with,” Lewis says. “The reason we started the festival was to support the brewers.
“Wind back 11, 12 years ago we were right in the mix of the burgeoning brewer scene that Adelaide had. All those brewing companies that started in that period, Pirate Life, Little Bang, Prancing Pony, Big Shed.
“They were all our personal friends and we started the festival on the back of that to support them and to be able to put great beers into people's hands while giving them a great festival experience.
“So this now gives us an opportunity to give them more support,” he adds. “We can put all of those brewers basically on that arena, on the tennis court at The Drive and put those bands on that stage at the same time and it’s not as segregated.”
There are many areas of The Drive to discover if you’re ready to explore and look hard enough. Lewis says these will be transformed for the festival.
“It's got some real undiscovered nooks and crannies that we're gonna be able to put really cool things in,” he explains. “Stuff like the Secret Pickle Saloon which used to be a secret bar within the festival. It will still be that but it'll be bigger and it'll have the scale that it should have.
“Artists like Tim Rogers and Kieran J Callinan and Sonic Reducer, they'll have a really great second stage that they'll get to play on.”
Beer & BBQ Festival ran annually at the Adelaide Showgrounds from 2015 until 2025. Lewis shares that it may be too early to tell, but an annual festival is the goal they’re striving towards.
“We'd love to do ten years in the city,” he admits. “Let's see how it goes and let's see how the public respond.
“I've always known that there's enough groundswell of support for the event and there's enough need for something a little bit left of centre like we do. Whether people can get out there and afford it, let's see.”
Tickets to the 2026 Adelaide Beer & BBQ Festival go on sale from 11am, Thursday, April 9th.
Beer & BBQ Festival 2026
Friday, July 10th
TISM
Ben Kweller
Ratcat
The Mavis's
Brad Chicken & The Bootstraps
Drew Akin
Sonic Reducer
Sandy Dish
Hesh
Jon Ann
I Can't Believe It's Not Silverchair
Saturday, July 11th
Tropical Fuck Storm
SPEED
Party Dozen
Public Figures
Bromham
Tim Rogers’ Le Charme Defensif
Kirin J Callinan
The Loud Hailers
Stupid Fuck The Silly Clown
El Coyote
Friday, July 10th - Saturday, July 11th – The Drive, Adelaide, SA
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
