Rocket City Brewfest – Wrap Up
Free the Hops posted a Brewfest Guest Survey (turn cookies on); if you attended the Brewfest, please fill it out in order to improve the next event. Volunteers were sent a survey via email.
Brewfest met every goal set by FTH: safety, attendance, fund-raising, public awareness, volunteers, and beer industry participation. I heard that a couple of legislators attended: Randy Hinshaw (D-21) and Butch Taylor (D-22) - I missed seeing them – Randy has been a consistent supporter of Free the Hops and does a great job representing my District 21.
The Police didn’t see any problems and made no arrests. The security guards didn’t have many problems except for a couple of people who didn’t want to leave.
About 2000 people attended Friday night and another 1500 people attended Saturday afternoon. More than 100 volunteers helped out each day. There were also about 150 band and restaurant and beer industry people working to ensure that guests were satisfied with the event. The promoter (Venue Management of Birmingham) did a fantastic job organizing and executing the event.
Note that every part of the Brewfest was geared toward local and regional vendors as much as possible: local bands (Hot Soup, Hossfly, Johnny Black and the J-Birds, Bob Walters Band of NOLA, Shametown, and Witchdoctors); on-line tickets were sold using a Birmingham vendor (Ticket Biscuit); local restaurants were invited (Terry’s Pizza, Chef’s Table, Beauregards, Stem and Stein, Ol Heidelberg, FredBread, plus a couple of others – Dolce and Ketchup); regional breweries were highlighted (Olde Towne, Lazy Magnolia, Good People, Terrapin, Highlands, Yazoo, Abita, Sweetwater, Red Brick, Boulevard, and Dominion); Birmingham promoter (Venue Management); and local beer distributors (Turner and Supreme). Huntsville’s uber-beer-bar The Nook was one of the sponsors. Samuel Adams was also a sponsor, and as they represent the National Brewer Patriot they were most welcome.
Free the Hops made a good bit of money which will primarily be used to help pay for lobbying (we are a Statewide special interest lobbying group), plus other expenses associated with a non-profit. FTH also made enough to continue public awareness campaigns in Huntsville.
Lessons Learned:
- we needed about 10 more volunteers each day.
- we need to take better care of brewers (hotel rooms, brunch, gift bags).
- we need to ensure that the facility or promoter takes better care of the restrooms (hourly sweeps).
- we needed a couple more portapotties.
- we needed a little more ice.
- we needed more soft drinks and water.
It looks like FTH will host another Rocket City Brewfest next year. If you have any suggestions or comments or criticisms, go ahead and post them here.
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Just to be clear. We partner with Venue Management to help us produce this thing. There’s a lot of licensing, permits, logistics, advertising, and negotiating that we simply couldn’t do very well on our own. FTH is 100% volunteer-run. None of us receive personal profit for RCBF. So these guys are profit-motivated and experienced professionals that help us put this on.
We were involved in all planning stages to some degree – usually the degree we wanted to be involved in. We let those guys deal with the ABC Board. =)
We had Tier II (beer + food samples) tickets for Sunday – we turned up at 5 pm, which was only halfway through the day, and nearly all the food was gone. The food people were just apologizing and saying they ran out. We got some (delicious) FredBread, some cheese and fruit from one of the caterers, and Beauregard’s wings. That’s it! I think the food demand was seriously underestimated and needs to be addressed next year.