ENBF Recovery & Data

Aric, Kendall and me, manning the booth
and looking good in our logo tees.
Photo courtesy of @KennysFrmHseChz

Whew. I think I've finally recovered from yesterday's East Nashville Beer Fest.

While I didn't get to do much drinking (er...tasting), our booth was slammed with folks lining up to taste the beer. Black Betty and Ginger were on tap, along with a secret keg of pale ale. I cannot imagine doing a beer festival like that alone or even with one other person. We had three people manning the booth almost the whole time, and even had some friends rotate in to help pour and give us short breaks.

I didn't hear any complaints about the beer, which I'll count as a plus. We had several people who kept coming back for more, and a lot of people who told us that their friends had sent them over specifically to try Ginger. That was the big win in my mind. I think that Ginger is going to be our big seller and finding out that people were recommending it specifically was really exciting.

Now for the Data:

I geek out on data and had to figure this out. This is a wild guess, but I think we served about 1,500 beers over the course of 5 hours. Tasting glasses at the event were about five ounces and we were told to fill them half-way, which almost never happened. We served 45 gallons (5,760 oz) of beer at the event. If each pour averaged four ounces, that works out to 1,440 glasses, almost 300 per hour. (The 300 number passes the sniff-test, too. That is an average of five per minute, and we had two people pouring most of the time. One beer every 24 seconds per server sounds busy but reasonable.)

On top of that, we sold about 50 pint glasses and 75 shirts in 95 transactions, which was far more than I expected. With a purchase happening every three minutes, I ended up dedicated to the sales and chatting with folks who stayed to talk about the brewery and our beer...I hardly poured any of the beer myself. (PS- If you want a shirt of your own, check out http://shop.fatbottombrewing.com.)

Finally, lessons learned (first-timers take note):

1. Label the beers. I never thought to do this, but we ended up telling people the names and styles of the two beers on tap over and over (1,500 times!). That alone was mentally fatiguing and gets old quickly.
2. Check all your taps and connections BEFORE the event. I had trouble with a few kegs, where I couldn't get the keg tapped. That was a simple, dumb mistake that could have been avoided if I had just checked that each valve was set up properly before we were in the heat of service.
3. Price your merchandise to be whole dollars AFTER tax. A $4 pint glass works out to $4.37 and a t-shirt is $19.67 after tax. I was set up to swipe credit cards on the iPad and didn't have any change, because I  never imagined how many people (almost 50%) wanted to pay with cash. Next time a shirt will be $20 with tax, a pint will be $4.50 and we'll have a cash box with change.

Finally, a special thanks to my wife Dru (@Shmooobob), friends Chatty (@cbialeschki), Heath (@heathseals), and Kendall (@krjoseph), and taproom manager Aric (@Erco777) for helping out at the booth. This was my first beer fest and it was a success only with their help.

We'll see you at the next one!