Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

I think discussing the festival price is a good idea. Do most people think $25 is a lot of money? Almost all of the fests I go to are more expensive. But perhaps "homebrew" has less value in people's minds. We also don't want people coming who just want to get wasted on the cheap.

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You can't go lower than $20. That has to be a base line. I don't think $25 is too bad to drink unlimited pours for 4 hours. Same price as Millstream event this weekend we use to pour at.

I am not interested in lowering the price. I don't know of any festival cheaper than ours. The people who we should be getting are used to paying more than that for a beer festival. We are not hitting the market that we should be hitting. The hard core craft beer drinkers, and even home brewers did not know about our festival. How do we find those people?

I suggest we add a new cabinet position. Beer Nuts Festival coordinator. The events coordinator would continue to manage other events. We do not need a club vote on this. The club by-laws allow the cabinet to make a decision on adding a cabinet position.

We need another tap box. We have more than enough beer to run 4 booths. We could keep beers on longer.

We need to be marketing via AHA, somehow.

We spent $500 on marketing with KRNA, who ran 4 commercials a day, for a week. Including ticket giveaways. But our attendance was not much higher than last year.

In years past, members sold a lot of paper tickets, prior to the event. I think we have lost something there.

I know there will be some talk about moving the festival to NewBo. I am not sold on this idea. I don't think we have outgrown Benz. Benz doesn't charge us anything, gives us autonomy, and goes above and beyond with support (licensing, and permits come to mind). Finally, there is no greater friend to the Cedar Rapids Beer Nuts than Benz. They have been central in our ability to grow into the club we are today.

I really have no interest in moving the festival from Benz. They got us started and have been our friend for a long time. They provide so much and do it with a smile. We have not outgrown the space. If we actually got the 500 people we want we would still have the space. I like NewBo and all but we get so much support from Benz to do our festival there I would hate to see that severed. IF we ever outgrew the venue that would be different but we are a long ways from that. They put in a lot of work to help us pull off our event.

I concur with staying at Benz; for all of the reasons stated.

Having separate chairs for the Club Events and the Festival I think is a really good idea and is a change whose time has come.

I think Dan did a great job wearing both hats the past two festivals, exceptional I think may be a better word...but I do think one person having to do both results un-needed stress.

Spreading the work across two positions will make it easier for folks to step forward and volunteer to lead/coordinate; and not feel they are taking on too much.

I recommend and would support a cabinet decision that would create two positions which splits the responsibility of the current Club Activities Chair; one specific for the Festival, and the other for coordinating the Club Activities.

If a Festival Chair position is created; where should the responsibility of coordinating our pours for the other Festivals reside? I think it would be good for the Festival Chair to take that on; given how that visibility will give that individual visibility into the dates of our collegial beer clubs.

The Activities Chair could then focus on the Club Competitions, Tech Meetings, Big Brew Day, and other activities separate from managing participation in the Beer Festivals (including ours). Are there other duties the Activities Chair is expected to perform?

Would these be elected positions? Or appointed?

Thoughts?

I think we need to find someone in the PR field to help us out. Within the club would be ideal, but I have a very good friend that works for Nexstar broadcasting and has been doing TV/Radio sales for many years. Maybe we invite her to a cabinet or club meeting sometime? Find out where our $$ is best spent and how to get to the younger crowd, craft nerds and homebrewers.

For it only being the 4th year it's pretty damn impressive. How much bigger can it get? Let's find out.

Having dates and posters for our fest all ready to go by the time the BENZ BEERFEST happens would be a good idea. Benz Beerfest goers are literally the exact market we are aiming for, and we could put up the posters (and hand out small fliers?) at our booth there.

If Benz is still happy to help us put on the event, then I think we should stick with them.

Is the date for the festival right? Maybe there are just too many other beer festivals that come before ours. The serious craft beer drinkers will probably come out regardless, but the casual beer fan might go to only 1-2 festivals per year.

There are some resources on the AHA website. We could add our club profile here: http://ahaclubs.homebrewersassociation.org/ClubProfiles. There are only two other profiles listed for the state of Iowa. Maybe we could use in some manner.

I agree on the date. We did much better this year, and i thought it would be a perfect date, but now I think it might be too late in the summer. Kids back to school, parents are focused on that aspect, college starting so any students home for the summer are MIA.

How much earlier could we push it to? Manchester has event August 20th we are invited to. We have a club out of Burlington that wants to pour at our festival so we need to get them a date. I still think we need a club calendar where members can post up local events as they find out about them so at a glance we can try to avoid certain weekends that could be a conflict.

We would need to get the grain order in front of this to promote lots of brewing within the club.

All random ideas off the top of my head

We told Refs that we'd coordinate dates with their festival, so we have more room between us for folks to brew. So, reach out to them ASAP and start that conversation if we're trying to nail down next years date right away.

July is too busy. I can tell you that I would be hard pressed to be very involved, between vacations, barbecue events, and everything else that happens that month. June is too early. I really think we had a good weekend for it this year. I don't think timing was our issue.

brownbeard wrote:July is too busy. I can tell you that I would be hard pressed to be very involved, between vacations, barbecue events, and everything else that happens that month. June is too early. I really think we had a good weekend for it this year. I don't think timing was our issue.

Same for me. I am usually gone most of July. I liked timing this year and September is good too. There seems to always be discussion of football games hurting our attendance. If we had a large screen with the game or games on it would be a non-issue. They did that for the Iowa game at the Northside Oktoberfest in IC recently. Not sure how, cost, etc., but that may be worth exploring if want to stick to early fall. Should definitely avoid the Iowa vs. Iowa State game day.

Simple business lesson. Identify your market peers/competition. Then we can make a decision on how best to capture our market share. I like to call this penetration, which is my favorite business term. Your odds of good penetration are better when there is less competition (applies to many parts of life). There seems to be a beer event nearly every weekend anymore. They are typically about the same time every year. People plan for these events to be about the same time every year so they can plan accordingly in advance to attend. Everybody has a finite amount of time to work with and calendars fill fast. Lets get a list of the major beer events in the area or places we may go that we may be competing for patrons with. This should be the first step in selecting our day outside of know shitty weather months.

Obviously we need space between Benz in May and our festival to make beer. That makes it best to be pushed towards the end of summer/early fall. We need to avoid Great Taste Weekend (mainly because many of us are in Madison), Festival of Iowa Beers, NewBo Brew and BBQ, Quad Cities Homebrew Fest (So we can support that one), there are more. Throw these on a calendar and see where we have the best chance of the least amount of competition.

Here are some events and possible dates for them in 2016 based on when they were in 2015 or if already announced.

Benz Beerfest - May 7th or 14th (previously 5/9/15)
National Homebrew Conference - June 9th-11th in Baltimore
Linn County Fair Beer Contest - June 25th (previously 6/27/15)
NewBo Brews and BBQ - July 9th
Tour de Brew - July 9th (previously 8/29/15 due to weather on 7/11/15)
Rivers Edge Homebrew Festiv-Ale (Quad Cities) - July 16th (previously 7/18/15)
Great Taste of the Midwest - August 13th
Independence Brew B Q - August 20th (previously 8/22/15)
Big Grove Anniversary Bottle Share/Richard the Whale release party - August 27th (previously 8/29/15)
Festival of Iowa Beers - September 4
Brewfest At the Ballpark - Friday, September 9th (previously 9/11/15, first time event, not sure if/when happen again but likely sometime)
Northside Oktoberfest - October 1 (previously 10/3/15)
BrewNost! - October 14 (on 10/16/15 in a about 10 days)

Our date we used this year, the weekend before Festival of Iowa Beers looks decent. Big Grove event was in the morning so not sure if impacted us or not. Mid-late September OK. Between us and Quad Cities group there is a gap from NewBo Brews and BBQ to Great Taste too. Again, I am pretty much out for July. The date Quad Cities used last year looks good to me for them in 2016. With more notice maybe we can be a little bigger there this year. Even if I could not go to that one I could likely send a beer in 2016. In the end, it would benefit us to get comfortable with a weekend so we can do it about the same time every year.

2016 GABF: October 6-8, 2016

Saw this sticker plastered to the front page of the Gazette this morning and said, "why can't we do this for our festival, too?" We should look into the cost, but it's another way to get ourselves out there in the public eye.