‘I just feel used:’ Vendors owed thousands of dollars as Toronto Festival of Beer declares bankruptcy

Nomxd Brew Co. is one of dozens of vendors who worked the Toronto Festival of Beer last year. (Jessica Kowalik)

For months, Ami DiPasquale kept calling, texting and emailing, trying to recover the thousands of dollars she says she earned at the Toronto Festival of Beer last year.

The replies hardly came. Then came the notice: the decades-old festival is bankrupt.

DiPasquale co-owns Heirloom Food Company, an Etobicoke-based catering and food truck business operating for nearly a decade.

She says her company is selective about festivals but had been a vendor at this beer festival for years.

The Toronto Festival of Beer, helmed by President Les Murray, has run for nearly 30 years out of Bandshell Park at Exhibition Place where local vendors and independent brewers serve guests.

Last year, however, the festival moved to the Toronto Event Centre.

DiPasquale said last year’s festival was notably different, saying it was “drastically less busy” than what she was used to in the past and that it wasn’t “well organized.”

“It just wasn’t really the same festival anymore,” she said in an interview with CTV News Toronto.

“They usually would have pretty well-known bands there, like Ice Cube, and Ludacris, and Third Eye Blind. So, that was kind of a selling point, and like (last) year, he didn’t have that same type of presence with the bands.”

The festival was open to the public for two days in July, with the third day being booked off for a private event.

In preparation for the private event, Heirloom, she said, prepared around 1,000 plates of food.

Food vendors are usually paid in cash or prepaid tokens, DiPasquale explained, while bar vendors are paid exclusively in tokens. She says she’s owed $679 in token redemptions and $4,520 from the private event.

Despite numerous attempts to contact Murray after the festival, DiPasquale says communication from the festival’s organizers has been sparce.

“The last email he sent me was September 2025, where he acknowledged that he said, ‘I’m confirming that your credit balance with the festival is $5,199′,” DiPasquale said, adding that he assured her he would be processing her payment sometime that week.

“That’s the last time I heard from him and I sent him a demand letter from my lawyer in November 2025.”

She’s says she’s not the only vendor waiting to be paid.

‘Very frustrating and disappointing’

Jessica Kowalik, co-founder of Niagara’s Nomxd Brew Co., launched her brewery with her fiancé about a year ago and says she can count on one hand the number of festivals they have participated in so far.

“Being craft beer lovers, we’ve attended Toronto Festival of Beer before in the past. So, when we started our craft brewery, we were really excited to apply for the festival itself,” Kowalik told CTV News Toronto.

Applying to work for the festival was costly, Kowalik noted, as she and her partner spent $1,000 on the entry fee and an additional $200 on liability insurance. She says they both took time off from their day jobs to work since the festival started on Friday.

Over the course of the weekend, Kowalik said they went through all 20 cases of beer that they brought up, amounting to a total of just over $2,000. The last time Kowalik said she had heard from Murray was on the last day of the festival.

“In our contract, it says that (they) would try their best to pay us within the 60 days of the event ending. We have sent multiple text messages to Les, emails, phone calls, we reached out to two contacts that we had at Beerlicious and they told us their contracts ended with the last day of the festival,” Kowalik said, adding she had never heard from Murray.

“It’s very frustrating and discouraging. Honestly, as a small business, that may not seem like a lot but just starting out, that money could have been put towards other things being paid out for it. We were just kind of disappointed in the whole experience overall.”

CTV Toronto contacted Les Murray several times but we did not receive a response.

Deborah Hornbostel, senior vice president at licensed insolvency firm MNP Ltd., said the trustee (Beerlicious) has no comment to provide at this time.

Filed for bankruptcy

Beerlicious officially filed for bankruptcy on the morning of April 13, and named MNP Ltd. as the trustee overseeing the case.

In a statement of affairs, Beerlicious noted it was filing for bankruptcy for various reasons, including lack of working capital or funding, overhead increasing, competition, and economic downturn.

DiPasquale said she was notified of the company’s bankruptcy on the day of her interview with CTV News Toronto on April 17 from MNP Ltd. directly.

Kowalik, however, said she was unaware of the legal process underway, saying she heard the company was going bankrupt from another vendor who attended the event.

“When I heard that, I thought to myself, ‘Well, it looks like we’re not going to be getting paid for this event,’” Kowalik said.

Seventy vendors are named among the list of creditors who have outstanding balances waiting to be paid, some with tens of thousands of dollars owed.

Creditors meeting this week

MNP Ltd. is holding a creditors meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

During this meeting, Doug Hoyes, a licensed insolvency trustee and co-founder of Hoyes, Michalos and Associates Inc., says it is likely they will break down the assets Beerlicious has to pay out to creditors.

“I assume what will happen at the creditors meeting is the trustee (Beerlicious) will say, ‘Well, there’s no assets, which means there will be no money to pay out to the creditors,’” Hoyes said.

“The purpose of corporate bankruptcy is to take the assets of the company and distribute them to the creditors. Well, in this case, it doesn’t sound like there’s much in the way of assets.”

Beerlicious is listed to have assets valued at $8,087.13. There is about $2 million owed to the dozens of vendors who worked the Toronto Festival of Beer. Murray was included in that list with an outstanding wage of roughly $23,000.

The creditors meeting will grant vendors the opportunity to ask any questions they have, Hoyes said, like asking about the assets and what happened with the money.

“I assume that this festival charged money for people to get in … so, what happened to that then? Where did that money go?” he said.

DiPasquale says she is planning on attending Wednesday’s meeting. Ultimately, she wants to see accountability, especially after months of effectively no contact.

“I’m pretty upset. I think it’s kind of impacted me emotionally, I just feel used,” DiPasquale said.

“I just feel like he’s treating us really badly, all of us … we’re all small businesses, I just don’t feel like it’s fair what he’s doing to us.”