You can see the smoke from miles away, and smell it all over town. Every May, the downtown streets of Owensboro are filled with tens of thousands of people seeking barbecue, fair food, midway games, craft booths, and lots of fun.
For some reason, it seems to rain every year. Why is that? But it doesn’t keep the crowds away for long.
The Festival board works year-round to make the annual weekend what it is known for, “a festival of food and fun.” There are food booths as far as the eye can see and entertainment scheduled every hour on multiple stages. Not to mention a 5K run/walk, arts & crafts, keg toss, mutton-glutton V.I.P. party, backyard cookoff, pie eating contest, carnival rides, and children’s activities in the family pavilion.
For most people in Owensboro, the Bar-B-Q Fest is an annual tradition. We know about the crowds, we know about the food, and we know about the fun. But for this special feature, Owensboro Living wanted to give you a little bit of history behind the Festival and an inside view into what goes on behind the scenes. Or booths, as the case may be.
Economic Impact:
“Barbecue is an important part of our community image and attracts many visitors to Owensboro to stay in our hotels and spend their tourism dollars here,” said Shannon Wetzel, Executive Director of the Owensboro Daviess County Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Bar-B-Q Festival is the preeminent event for building that image.
Though no formal economic study has been done on the Festival recently, it certainly has an impact on our local economy. “Our Festival board spends at least $125,000 locally purchasing supplies, paying entertainers and providing Festival activities,” said Sharon NeSmith, Festival co-chair. “And that does not include the approximately $10,000 spent by each of our six cooking teams, the hundreds of dollars our backyard cooks spend for their supplies, and the dollars vendors spend for their booth space and supplies.”
NeSmith estimates that with the amount the cooking teams spend locally on supplies, plus the amount the Festival spends on events and entertainment, $200,000 is reasonably spent that weekend at local businesses. And that does not include the amount attendees spend on hotel rooms, meals in local restaurants, or in shops while they’re here.
Expenses for the Festival are paid through the vendor booth fees and a small group of generous donors, such as Specialty Foods Group, returning for the second year as a GOLD sponsor.
Supporting Non-Profits:
The economic impact of the Festival on local non-profits is also significant. As NeSmith sees it, “Everyone who visits the Festival and purchases food and drinks has a hand in returning money to needed areas in our community,” which is a factor most people visiting the Festival may not realize.
Altogether, non-profits collect on average $45,000-$60,000 each year, generated from the Festival. That comes out to roughly $50,000 donated by the cooking teams’ to their respective churches and another $10,000 generated from the Festival for other non-profits.
Non-profit groups take priority consideration when a service is needed for the Festival operations. For example, in 2015, Crime Stoppers earned $750 selling ice to vendors. The Festival also donated a total of $5,100 to Owensboro High School Red Steel Band, KWC Percussion Group, AAUW, Burns Middle School Cheerleaders, Owensboro Museum of Science & History, and the Telephone Pioneers for services they provided. The Festival also made a donation of $5,000 to assist in purchasing the “Home Place” statue by the Daviess County Fiscal Court.
“The Festival positively impacts hundreds of people and businesses in our area, and provides the kickoff to summer with something for everyone from food and drink to shopping and entertainment,” NeSmith said.
Cooking Teams:
On the top shelf of the Men’s Club building at Our Lady of Lourdes lays a long line of mini-kettle trophies stacked two rows high, each with plaques designating the year of participation. The most recent, 2015, looks exactly the same as the trophy from the first year in 1979. There are four ribbons for overall winner, along with nine first place, 14 second place, and nine third place ribbons.
Most cooking teams have similar shelves or cases. They hang on to those kettle trophies like badges of honor.
“It’s friendly competition, but it’s definitely about bragging rights,” said Bob Freels, team captain for St. Pius X Catholic Church.
Teams compete for the “Governor’s Cup,” the prize awarded to the best overall Bar-B-Q cooking team. In recent years, St. Mary Magdalene has been the team to beat. In fact, they placed first in three food categories in 2015. In 37 years, they’ve won 16 times.
St. Pius has won the cup twice, and been runner-up four times. Freels says this might be his last year participating. “I’m 69 now, and I’ve had several heart attacks. It’s time for me to kick back a little,” he said. He rotates off the role of team captain following this year’s fest, but we’ll see if he actually bows out or not. There are three guys on the St. Pius team who have cooked in every single Festival. “They are up in their 80’s and still coming out,” Freels said.
The reason all these guys keep coming back? In a word: fun.
“I like the camaraderie with people from our church. You always see people you know. It’s also fun to eat samples right off the pit and share them with people you see walking by,” said John Mattingly, team captain for Blessed Mother. “We’re proud of what we cook.”
And they should be. Blessed Mother won the Governor’s Cup in ’96, ’99, ’01, ’02, and ’08.
“Really, it’s about having fun with church members. Everybody helps out, “ Freels said.
For as much work as the teams put in, it had better be fun. Generally speaking, the cooking teams show up on Thursday night to set up the pits and get all the supplies ready for the long weekend. Sometime during the night, the pits are lit so the teams can start selling sandwiches and cups of burgoo during lunch Friday.
St. Pius says they typically sell around 2,000 cups of burgoo and 2,000 sandwiches throughout the weekend.
The most impressive action happens Saturday at 3 p.m., when teams start selling burgoo by the gallon and meat by the pound. It’s not unusual to see lines of people several blocks long at each stand. In a good year, teams sell out in a couple hours.
To give you an idea of the amount of food we’re talking about, Precious Blood plans to cook 300 gallons of burgoo (in four 75-gallon kettles), between 350-400 chickens, 1000 lbs. of mutton, and 400 lbs. of pork.
Precious Blood team captain, Bruce Tucker, says it’s a “ton of work to set up everything we need in order to cook those quantities of food,” which is why they invest in equipment to make everything easier, like automatic burgoo stirrers in their building at the church. But at the Festival, Tucker says they have updated the way they set things up to make it as easy as possible and eliminate as much physical work as possible.
“I think we only have a couple of the original guys left cooking with us,” Tucker said. “We take great pride in it. All of us have a passion around what we do, and we are very thankful for all the hard work that the Bar-B-Q Festival Committee does for us!” Precious Blood, by the way, has three championships, including 2014.
All the money the teams make goes back into parish ministries.
St. Mary of the Woods, in Whitesville, participates every year but does not compete. “We only sell sandwiches and cups of burgoo, but we still make good money for our church,” said Kenny Nash, St. Mary’s team captain. Since they do not cook the bulk quantities the other teams cook, they bring two large smokers, instead of setting up the big pits. Nash says the church still loves being involved. “It’s a great time – mingling with the crowd. You meet people from all over the country.”
Life Community Church is making their debut in the cooking competition this year. Team captain, Charles McCarty, says the church cooking team is no stranger to Bar-B-Q. They regularly hold large cooks to raise money for their mission budget.
“We’ve never competed before, but we decided to give it a try. At least we’ll have fun. And the most important thing is raising a little money for God’s purposes,” McCarty said.
In the past, the church has held cooks to raise money for Hager Preschool and other projects. The church decided the money raised from the Bar-B-Q Festival this year will go to Sunrise Children’s Services.
The church expects to recruit about 80 volunteers to help throughout Friday night and Saturday at the fest. You can come and welcome the newcomers at their booth at 2nd & Frederica.
Backyard Cookoff
In the five years Todd Johnson and Kelly Ward have coordinated the Backyard Cookoff competition, they’ve overseen a tremendous period of growth. Participation has more than doubled, from 14 teams the last year Ward and Johnson competed to now averaging 35-plus teams. Most of those teams are local, but some have registered from Indiana and Tennessee.
Johnson and Ward attribute the growth of the competition to their experience as participants. “We know what it’s like to compete, so we know what the teams want to make their experience better,” Johnson explained. “We also have each team fill out an evaluation so we know how we can improve things the next year,” Ward added.
Plus, it’s just fun! It’s not a Kansas City-sanctioned event, but there are cash prizes and trophies on the line.
The duo has made small adjustments and changes over the years that have made a big difference for the cooking teams. Based on their experience and feedback from other teams, they decided to raise the entry fee, assign spaces with marked lines, clarify some rule changes, increase the number of judges, and streamline the judges’ results so the teams get their score that day.
Most importantly, Ward and Johnson have gathered more sponsors. The prize payout is now $2,750. “All the money we collect is paid out in prizes,” Ward said, which is a big draw for participants. “We couldn’t do what we do without our sponsors,” said Johnson.
The Backyard Cookoff teams are judged on three categories: chicken, pork, and beef. “The teams can enter any type of beef they want; brisket, meat loaf, steak, or anything,” Johnson explained.
The Cookoff is on 2nd Street, between Boardwalk Pipeline and the Convention Center. The teams are encouraged to offer samples to the public. Ward calls it, “a friendly, family atmosphere. And teams are happy to have people taste what they cook because they’re proud of it.”
[tw-divider]HISTORY OF THE BBQ FEST:[/tw-divider]
The first Festival was held April 27-28, 1979, downtown on the riverfront. It was sponsored by the Owensboro/Daviess County Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with local barbecue restaurants. Activities included tobacco spitting, pie eating, and fiddling.
The original brochure described the Festival as an attempt to “bring together the atmosphere of a country church picnic and the excitement of an urban street festival” to “spotlight Owensboro as the Bar-B-Q Capital of the World.”
In 1980, 11 teams entered, cooking more than 10 tons of mutton, 2,000 chickens and 1,200 gallons of burgoo. The crowd was estimated at 30,000.
A 1995 economic impact study by the Kentucky Department of Travel advised the Festival’s two days contributed approximately $2.4 million to Kentucky’s economy with $41,000 to local government tax revenues.
The Festival was ranked No. 5 in USA Weekend’s 10 “most prestigious and entertaining BBQ competitions” in 2014.
In 2015, Owensboro was named #8 on a list of the 11 best BBQ cities in the US by thrillist.com.
