The beer-and-music event Hop Jam, held the past three years at Bolton Valley, has been canceled this year following low ticket sales, according to the organizer.

“It was a very significant drop in sales,” said Meg Schultz, who through her company, Meg’s Events, put Hop Jam together. “Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined something that low.”

Schultz and Hop Jam’s social-media team announced the cancelation Thursday evening on Facebook. The event was scheduled to take place Aug. 19 with brewers from Vermont and states such as Tennessee and Connecticut, as well as live music from acts including Kung Fu and Natalie Cressman.

Schultz braced for lower sales this year in part because of customer-service problems at last year’s Hop Jam. She said she heard from “several dozen extra-angry people” after complaints of long lines and a disappointing VIP experience at last year’s Hop Jam.

Ticket sales, however, were only at 10 percent of what Schultz expected with three weeks to go before the event. Hop Jam drew close to 1,400 people last year and Schultz had already dropped her expectations to 1,000 to 1,200, but ticket sales fell far short of those numbers.

“I can’t shoulder the risk of not selling the tickets” in advance, Schultz said. “It was a bet I wasn’t going to take.”

She said organizers “failed a lot of things on the communication end” last year. Problems included a breakdown of ticket-scanning equipment at the start of an extremely hot day that led to backlogs that sullied many attendees’ experiences.

“We had kind of a perfect storm of problems last year,” Schultz said, adding that Hop Jam planned to quadruple the amount of bar space and change its check-in process. “The plan was pretty sound and we were pretty optimistic about that solving all of our problems from last year.”

The cancelation of Hop Jam is a rare defeat in the Vermont beer world that has seen an eruption in the number of brewers and beer-related events in the past decade. Schultz doesn’t believe last year’s problems are the only reason for slow ticket sales for Hop Jam, as she sees a degree of “fatigue” hitting the state’s beer-festival industry. The Hop Jam Facebook post Thursday noted that “ticket sales were noticeably slower for several other beer fests that our organizers are associated with.”

The growth in brewers and festivals could lead to some disappearing due to “survival of the fittest,” according to Schultz. Popular Vermont breweries opening their own tasting areas, as The Alchemist has done and Lawson’s Finest Liquids is about to do, has partially lessened the impact of beer festivals as the place to find hard-to-get Vermont beer, Schultz said.

Another event she organizes, the SIPtemberfest in the Mad River Valley, is sold out for its late-September dates. Schultz said SIPtemberfest took longer to sell out than in the past.

One event taking place this weekend, the Stowe Brewers Festival, has seen no fatigue in the beer-festival business. “Ticket sales have been great. We are ahead of where we were last year,” said Lisa Senecal, one of the organizers of the event that began Friday and concludes Saturday. “We’re really pleased with the growth.”

The Stowe festival is in its third year and has seen 25 to 30 percent growth each year since its debut, Senecal said. She expects up to 3,500 attendees this weekend and said the festival will be able to hold about 4,000. The festival space on Weeks Hill Road can hold as many as 7,500, and Senecal said it could reach that number if steady growth continues.

She does expect future weeding-out of beer festivals. “The state is probably maxing out for the number of large-scale beer-related events,” Senecal said, noting that somewhat slow early sales this year in Stowe may have been due to a wet spring dousing summer thoughts.

Schultz said she hopes to revive Hop Jam or something similar. “It’s on life support right now. I don’t want to quite pull the plug on future events,” she said. “I’m optimistic that we will have something to replace Hop Jam.”

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.