This weekend, thousands of people will pack into Pullman Yards for the 20th annual SweetWater 420 fest with a lineup of local bands and beyond, all centered around a “fan-first experience” that pays homage to festival roots. The festival is hosted every year by SweetWater Brewing Company, an Atlanta-based craft brewery owned by Tilray Beverages.
“This year’s festival promises to be bigger and better than ever before, with top headliners, great beers and non-stop fun,” Tilray Beverages North America President Ty Gilmore said.
The 2025 festival is a sort of “sweet spot” for SweetWater Brewing. This year, Georgia-grown artists like Drive-By Truckers and Linqua Franqa will take the stage alongside groups like the Revivalists and Cypress Hill. There will be a general stage and an “Exclusive Kush VIP” area for certain performances.
It’s a smaller festival than some years past, like the 2022 event at Centennial Park that drew 80,000 people with three stages. It’s also bigger than last year’s single-stage festival focused on local bands.
But SweetWater 420 Fest has changed with every venue — and it’s had several. It started as a bar crawl with a hired band following the crowd before moving to proper locales at Oakhurst and Candler Park. In the mid-2010s, it moved to Centennial Park and exploded in size. Last year, the festival moved to Pullman Yards and had a last-minute transformation.
“If somebody looks at 420 Fest at Pullman Yards versus 420 Fest at Centennial Park, it’s a completely different vibe, different size, different makeup, different experience,” SweetWater Brewing senior brand manager Evan Woolard said. “But it was awesome.”
Woolard said the festival had to move from Centennial Park and landed on Pullman Yards last year, likening it to an analog version of the immersive Las Vegas Sphere venue.
But weeks before the festival was set to begin with headliners Beck and Slightly Stoopid, the organizers announced it had changed to a more “intimate” festival with a totally different lineup. Instead of big names and big ticket prices, the event would be free to enter with a $10 donation to Waterkeeper Alliance. The stage was dominated by small, local acts.
Organizers refunded the original tickets, too. It was a surprise for attendees of the long-standing festival, but Woolard explained it as the process of “starting over and starting a foundation.”
“I think the biggest thing, whether you’re a festival or a brand is when you change where you’re at and you need to change the format, folks don’t know what to expect,” Woolard said. “I think part of last year, even for the organizers, we didn’t quite know what to expect.”
But Woolard said the SweetWater Brewing team learned a lot from last year’s event. The 2025 festival will blend some of last year’s features with some older festival elements. He said organizers have already sold out of VIP tickets and expect about 18,000 to 20,000 attendees over the three-day weekend.
A big focus is the festival’s environmentalist streak. Woolard said the festival will still donate $10 of every ticket sold to the Water Keeper Alliance, a worldwide network of environmental organizations that protect bodies of water.
“If you talk to our marketing guys, brewers, beer tenders, anybody at SweetWater, one of the first things they’ll tell you is you can’t have good beer without clean water,” Woolard said. “For us, it’s about all of the different parts that make SweetWater, SweetWater, and one of those things is protecting the environment.”
The festival takes place a few days before Earth Day on April 22, and Woolard said the entire event is a “celebration of Mother Earth.” That’s why organizers packed Pullman Yards with upcoming green initiatives like a VIP stage powered by solar energy and compost and recycling for food vendors.
All the SweetWater beer and drinks will also be served in cans. Woolard said the initiatives are a lot of “experimenting” to weave an environmentally friendly mission into a weekend of great music and beer.
SweetWater 420 Fest will also include a “Planet 420 Zone” where SweetWater and Waterkeeper Alliance will “activate” their work, a family area, bike and scooter valet, a “BoatHouse” with a pool and merch and a VIP lounge.
“It’s the best weekend of the year,” Woolard said.
SweetWater 420 Fest will run April 18-20 at Pullman Yards. Tickets and a full lineup are available online. Daily General Admission tickets cost $80, and weekend admission starts at $195.
I’m would love to be a food truck vendor here, please contact me if it’s not too late