This month, the annual SweetWater 420 Fest reconvenes for its 20th year, held for the second time at Kirkwood’s Pullman Yards. The festival, hosted by SweetWater Brewing Company, is a celebration of Earth Day, music, and beer (and, for some, cannabis culture). Though the event has shrunk in recen t years, it remains a beloved event and a surprising engine of water conservation. SweetWater Brewing has been passionate about clean waterways since Freddy Bensch and Kevin McNerney launched the business in 1997. The brewery’s namesake is Sweetwater Creek, where early team members often went fishing. For years, SweetWater has supported Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting global waterways, donating nearly $190,000 to the organization since 2016. “As a craft brewery, you can’t make great beer without clean water,” says Evan Woolard, senior brand manager at SweetWater. “So it’s part of our mission to help those who steward these river systems.” SweetWater mounted its first 420 Fest in Oakhurst in April 2005, naming it in honor of Earth Day—a distinction it shares with SweetWater’s eternally popular brew, the 420 Extra Pale Ale. Originally a folksy neighborhood celebration, the festival grew rapidly, moving first to Candler Park and then to downtown Centennial Olympic Park in 2014, where it drew 30,000 revelers. But roadblocks recently forced the company to reimagine the event. In 2023, festivities moved to the brewery property in Ansley Park; SweetWater cited “several factors” for the move, but city officials blamed a 2019 Georgia Supreme Court order that made it nearly impossible to ban firearms on public grounds. That festival drew 5,000 attendees, a far cry from years past. Last year’s event, moved to Pullman Yards, was downsized abruptly when organizers refunded ticket sales two weeks beforehand and announced that several headliners would not be performing. Instead, they offered a more “intimate festival,” free to enter with a $10 donation to Waterkeeper Alliance. For festival organizers, it was a pivot long overdue. “We were following the playbook of the Centennial Park years when we should have blown the dust off the books from the early days at Candler Park,” says Patrick Clark, sponsorship and experiential senior manager at SweetWater. “And that’s what we eventually did: focusing on uniting a community of listeners, with money raised from the party going to our longtime buds at Waterkeeper Alliance.” This year, SweetWater 420 Fest will again be ticketed, with $10 of every sale going to Waterkeeper Alliance. Headliners include The Revivalists, Marcus King, and Greensky Bluegrass. Despite the changes over the years, Woolard says, “the DNA of the festival has remained the same.” The return to roots is also about celebrating the city that has made the brewery and its namesake festival possible, he adds: “Truth is, we’re hosting something bigger than 420 Fest; it’s a reunion.” This article appears in our April 2025 issue. The post Though not as big as it once was, SweetWater 420 Fest’s DNA is still the same appeared first on Atlanta Magazine. ...read more read less