Adding spice to celebration

More than 30 teams will compete in Waterbury’s new barbecue festival sanctioned by the New England Barbecue Society and the Kansas City Barbeque Society.

The weekend-long Green Mountain BBQ Championship is expected to draw 3,000 visitors to town. More than 1,000 advance tickets had been sold by last week.

The new event, sponsored by the Waterbury Rotary Club, will anchor the town’s quirky Not Quite Independence Day Festival, held the Saturday before July 4.

The festival will feature barbecue and craft beer vendors and a long list of musical performers, including Vermont country star Jamie Lee Thurston and the Seth Yacavone Blues Trio among other eclectic jazz, fusion and rock offerings.

Long Trail, a sponsor, will brew a specialty craft “Mystery” beer unique to this year’s competition, never to be brewed again.

The barbecue competition is drawing competitors from throughout the Northeast, according to event planner Jeremy Garrett of Waterbury’s J2L Events LLC.

Some competitors will also sell food at the event July 27 and 28.

“It’s like any other hobby that people do,” Garrett told the Record. “It’s a somewhat expensive hobby but very fulfilling, because you have something at the end of it that a lot of people love.”

Although competitive, such events foster camaraderie.

“They’re competing for two hours while they’re cooking but afterward they want to make new friends and they’re very helpful to newcomers,” Garrett said.

Waterbury’s Rotary Club expects the event to grow in the future.

“The Green Mountain BBQ Championship has the potential to bring thousands of people to Waterbury for the last weekend in June,” said incoming Rotary Club president Theresa Wood. “We see this event adding to the economic vitality of Waterbury and the surrounding area.”

Event organizers hope the festival will become Waterbury’s version of Stowe’s Oktoberfest, a “local” event drawing visitors from throughout the state.

Advance ticket sales have come from Boston and Montreal, plus a number of local visitors from Stowe and Mad River Valley, and also from St. Albans, Middlebury, Albany, Vergennes and St. Johnsbury.

“We’re basically pulling from northern Vermont,” Garrett said.

The event planner brought the idea to the Waterbury Rotary Club after organizing events in Boston and Philadelphia. “We met some great barbecue folks there and they said you guys should do something in Vermont,” he said.

The competition will be a smorgasbord of professional-grade and amateur pit masters, with “world champions” from Massachusetts, Maryland and Chicago — and 60 percent of competitors coming from out-of-state.