It Can’t Race Real Goats So Sly Fox Brewing Will Race Fictional Ones Instead

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Sly Fox Brewing’s main annual event has raised curious and amused eyebrows since it started 21 years ago.

“Most people are like, ‘What do you mean? How can you race goats?’” says Sly Fox Sales Director Peter Giannopoulos.

But with COVID canceling the charity goat race – yes, a real-live goat race — that usually draws 5,000 people to the suburban Philadelphia brewery the first Sunday of every May, Giannopoulos says, “Now it’s, ‘Wait, how can you virtually race goats?’”

Virtual goat racing, indeed. And that’s not just virtual races. It’s virtual goats, too.

Instead of staging the fundraiser that the defunct Philly Beer Scene magazine once called “Philly’s best beer event” and drew 60 goat competitors in 2018, Sly Fox will livestream an animated goat race on its Facebook page this Sunday at 2pm EDT. The human participants and audience are real (albeit cheering from behind a computer screen at home). The goats are not.

“They’re cartoon goats. Our marketing agency created the animation,” says Giannopoulos.

Here’s how it works. Together with a few Sly Fox employees, the agency drew up 25 goats, gave them each their own personality and backstory, and set them into a motion sequence that has them running from start to finish line.

Normally participants bring their own or borrowed goats to race. This time, they can “own” a fictional goat by buying a $25 t-shirt before midnight Saturday that gives them the opportunity to choose and name a digital profile. When the randomly selected but predetermined ruminant wins, those who bet on it will put their preferred name into a proverbial hat for someone at Sly Fox to pick out. As per tradition, that will become the name of this season’s Maibock beer.

The brewery will donate $5 from each shirt to the ​Hospitality Assistance Response of PA fund managed by the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association Educational Foundation. So far, more than 200 participants have signed up from as far away as Western Europe. It’s free to watch the festivities, of course, which will include a pre-recorded stein hoisting contest (in this case the competitors and steins exist IRL) and a backyard performance by the accordionist Alex Meixner, who’s performed previous years in the flesh.

The crew will also post archival footage of goat races past and unveil the Bock Fest Hall of Fame. The inaugural inductee will be none other than the beloved Peggy, the three-legged goat who by placing first in 2011 and 2012 turned the races from a hyper-local quirk to a widely embraced tradition.

“It’s random, fun and silly at the same time,” says Giannopoulos of the celebration. “It’s part of our brand. People know about it at this point.”

Brewers and drinkers closely associate German bocks with goats because brewers in Einbeck developed the bock style around the 14^th century. Though no one knows for certain how the beer name came about, Giannopoulos says that when these brewers traveled to other parts of Germany, “They had a weird accent that made beck sound like bock, the word for billy goat. So people were like, “You made a goat beer?”” The name – and the symbol — has stuck.

Traditionally, brewers make pale and airy Maibocks “May bocks” for spring drinking and dark, heavily malted (read: relatively high ABV), full-bodied doppelbocks for wintertime. The fun started at Sly Fox when former longtime head brewer Brian O’Reilly brought the idea for the goat races from the now-closed brewery where he’d worked previously.

Bringing the races online has been a laborious labor of love, says Giannopoulos, one that he hopes will not only distract and entertain fans sheltering in place but also bring them in to one of the brewery’s five functioning Pennsylvania taprooms to pick up their shirt and place an order for a beer and German food special while they’re there. Sly Fox’s pub business is down between 40% and 75%, depending on location, and one of the newest, in Reading, has temporarily closed.

So Sly Fox and other savvy breweries in similar situations are mining the depths of their creativity to stay relevant and make money.  

“You utilize what you’re unique at and try to bring that online,” Giannopoulos says. “For us, that’s the goat races, the stupidest sport ever, taken very seriously.”

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