3rd Annual DeLand Craft Beer Festival - Part 1 (The Idea)

Pretty much the greatest day of my year as a professional is the DeLand Craft Beer Festival.  Myself and Vinnie approached Jack Becker, Director of Mianstreet DeLand several years ago and asked if putting together a festival to benefit Mainstreet DeLand would be something he was interested in.  In all honesty, we went in with an argument, waiting for him to poo-poo the idea on the grounds that the city leaders would never allow it and it wouldn't be worth the risk.  Surprisingly, he was excited about it and said he wanted us to present it to the organization.  Once again, it was a fairly easy sell and the first festival went down in March 2010.  We have come a long way in three years and I have become extremely proud of this event.

Our first aim was to differentiate this event in a few major ways.  This festival was going to donate 100% of its profits to Mainstreet DeLand.  We felt this would enable us to keep a system of checks and balances in place.  As beer lovers, we could argue the point year after year that we wanted to simply keep making the festival better.  Taking money out of the hands of ourselves, the organizers, enables the festival to hang tight to the desire to keep it great at any cost.  The non-negotiable instrument in this case is that the Director of Mainstreet also could not get greedy for the revenue dollars generated by the festival because they would always have us tugging at their purse strings.  The relationship works and as along as Jack Becker stays with Mainstreet, this festival is guaranteed to get better and better.

The second way we were going to differentiate this event was who we are going to have pouring beers at our event.  At this event, we would not only have representatives of the breweries there, but the real spotlight was going to be on retailers, both on and off premise retailers, working the booths and pushing their business.  This carries with it two theories.  One is that when a brewery representative is usually asked by a festival goer "where they can get this delicious liquid," they are not quite certain given that they do not live in the area.  Now they can simply point to the retailer pouring side-by-side with them.  The second reason is that we always want to have people pouring beer who know the product, and who better that the retailers themselves to help out the brewery representatives?

Third, we will be different by never growing.  Get that - never growing!  As the years pass by, our intention is to keep getting better, NOT bigger.  By doing this, we will raise ticket prices every year, but never allow the crowd to grow beyond 700 people.  Quaint to be sure, but this allows us to keep a flow and a controllable crowd.  This also allows us to continually grow more adept at creating a great experience by keeping this number as a constant and not a variable.  

With DeLand, Florida growing as a beer town and more and more people wanting to see rare and creating offerings from breweries, Jack has allowed us to do one more magical and very important thing.  He is allowing us to purchase some very expensive beers and save them for the festival.  By giving us a budget, we as festival organizer are able to get product that other festivals are not wiling to take the chance on because they figure "We'll pack the place anyway, why bother with spending extra money we don't have to?"  In our case we figure, as Jim Collins put it, "the enemy of great is good."

Naturally, the most important piece of putting together an event that strives to be great is to have good business partners.  We have been lucky enough overt the years to have great reps working Florida from great breweries such as Anchor, Brooklyn, Stone, Craft Brewers Alliance, Bell's, Harpoon, Dogfish Head, Highland, Sam Adams, Rogue, Terrapin, Sierra Nevada, Abita, Woodchuck, and many others.  We've been been so lucky as to have the support of brewery owners such as Mr. Jeff Brown of Boulder Brewing, Tom Moench of Orange Blossom, and Bob Gordash of Holy Mackerel fame.

Also, no festival goes down without great community members and volunteers who dedicate their time and skills to an event.  We have had such great luck to have volunteers over the years, I cannot even begin to name them all off.  Especially helpful these few years has been the increase in our presence of home brewers and a huge nod goes to the Volusia County Homebrewers Association and particularly Ann Marie, Blair, and Daneaux for making the homebrewers presence a massive one!!  More on the homebrewers later on.......

Thankfully we will never be good enough and we will continue to get better and better.  Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 (The Organizing of This Festival).