07 May 2009

Seventy three days and counting


In a little over two months, the Brewers of Indiana Guild will be staging their 14th Indiana Microbrewers Festival at Optimists Park near 66th Street and College Avenue in the Indianapolis neighborhood of Broad Ripple. It will be on July 18th from 3pm to 7pm.

Because of the continued growing popularity of craft beer and the Microbrewers Festival, ticket sales will be limited to 4,200 tickets. This is the limit of what the park can hold safely. There are four ways to get tickets:

1.) Open a professional brewery and set up at the festival. Every attending brewery receives two tickets. This is an expensive and time consuming venture.

2.) Purchase tickets online at www.brewersofindianaguild.com beginning Monday, May 18th. This will be the only initial venue for ticket sales. At a date to be announced later, tickets will be available at Indiana breweries.

3.) Win tickets from 92.3 WTTS on Monday, May 11th. They will have listener contests during the afternoon and evening on that day.

4.) VOLUNTEER! We need volunteers. Lots of them. Not just the day of the festival, but all weekend. We are working on the details of the tasks, but here is a brief rundown of what we have:
Friday, July 17th : VIP Dinner at Optimists Park
The dinner runs from 6:30 to 9:30. We'll need volunteers from 5pm to 11pm for set up and clean up. Food and booze provided to volunteers.

Saturday, July 18th: Microbrewers Festival at Optimists Park
The festival runs from 3pm to 7pm. Set up begins at 9am. Tear down will last until 9pm. Volunteers will be broken up into shifts, allowing all volunteers to have at least two hours of free time during the festival. Festival admission and a t-shirt provided to volunteers.

Sunday, July 19th: Clean up
This will start probably around 11am or noon. This is for post festival clean up, making sure that bottle caps, cigarette butts, etc. are picked up. This should only last around 3 hours. Food and booze provided to volunteers.
For all three days, there will be various tasks, from checking id's to delivering ice to who knows what else. You will be on your feet and in the heat. Expect to work and get sweaty, but understand that we want to have fun and drink beer at the same time. Everybody who volunteered for the Winterfest had a great time and said they want to do it again.

If you are interested, please email Jason at hoosierbeergeek@gmail.com with date and time availabilities. First ones to email get first priority in volunteer scheduling.

And stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

2 comments:

  1. Wow.

    Have to leave a post here, but I think someone (from HBG, perhaps) needs to talk to the Brewers of Indiana Guild as this is getting ridiculous.

    Tickets are being limited to 4,200 as this is "the limit of what the park can hold safely"? Ummm...well, I have attended on most years since its inception and last year had the worst overcrowding that I ever recall--I believe the estimates put it right around 4,000. So instead of lowering the number, they're potentially raising it by a bit? Madness! If anything out of the ordinary had happened last year, a lot of people could have been seriously injured.

    Isn't it time to consider something a bit more drastic? It's obvious something needs to happen. Nobody probably wants to change to a larger venue, so why not consider a 2-day event, limited to perhaps 3,000 attendees per day? That would keep the crowding down while also allowing more money to be raised. Yes, the logistics of a 2-day event would require much more work, but wouldn't the final result be worth it?

    After the last year's Microbrewers Fest and the more recent Winterfest I really had hoped that *someone* might have learned a lesson.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think pretty much everyone will agree that last year's event was overcrowded. After hearing that there were plans to limit ticket sales this year, I was a bit relieved but very surprised when they actually increased the capacity by 200. Then again, that's going off an estimate of 4000 ticket sales, maybe they had 4200 last year, who knows.

    But on the other hand, maybe last year they weren't prepared for the number of people who turned out. I think that was the situation with Winterfest - who would guess a first time event would sell out? Then again, that's just speculation. I'm going to hope that this year the layout of the event is better with the knowledge going in that there will be 4200 people in attendance. It's a bit easier to plan something when you know how many people will be there.

    I don't necessarily think a 2-day event is the answer. Most people who would come to the first session would want to come to the second session as well (see GABF). Maybe the answer is better layout, maybe it's more breweries, maybe it's less ticket sales, maybe it's a different location. I don't know. I'd encourage you to bring up your concerns with BIG, as this crack commando unit of beer geeks doesn't have as much influence with BIG as some people might assume. We just like to help them out when we can.

    ReplyDelete