SALISBURY — All traditions have to start sometime.

The minds at Downtown Salisbury behind Bell Tower Brewfest hope they are onto something with their autumnal gathering in the city’s signature park that celebrates regional craft breweries.

Downtown Salisbury Event Coordinator Latoya Price said that last Saturday’s event was kind of a revamp of two previous events, Summer Sip and Brewbury Fest, which were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Summer Sip was a single-day event. Brewbury lasted two.

To try and draw out the weekend festivities, Price said they identified Buskers’ Bash as an event that would pair well with Brewfest.

“We wanted to make this into a destination,” Price said. “We want our downtown to be a destination, so we figured that Buskers’ Bash, which takes place the first Friday (of October), let’s take that and incorporate Bell Tower and make it a two-day event.”

Since they first had the event last year, Price’s organization has continued developing relationships with the brewers involved.

“It takes time for things to grow, so what we are trying to do is grow this event not only for our local breweries,” Price said.

However, the vision extends beyond Salisbury.

“We want to see what we can do to highlight our local breweries downtown but also see what we can do to bring people into the city of Salisbury and get those folks into our downtown shops to allow them to see what we do have,” Price said.

One thing they tried to modify this year was to improve on getting people to venture outside of the park.

“We noticed that when people come to these events, especially our beautiful park, sometimes people want to just stay there, so the question became how do we get them out of the park to explore downtown business and see what we offer,” Price said.

To encourage that exploration, this year, the event organizers included a downtown map that listed all of the downtown businesses.

“You’ve been to a mall and seen a kiosk that shows you where things are located,” Price said. “We took that concept and developed the map to show people what we offer and push them outside of the park.”

The organizers are already turning their attention to next year.

“Our greatest emphasis for year 3 is to grow the event, bring more people into our downtown and get people outside of the park to visit our downtown businesses and shop our boutiques,” Price said. “Whether that is a stroll, whether that is other activities that take place, we want to have a strong emphasis to get people into our downtown.”