I am looking to put together a beer tasting as a fund raiser for my Masonic lodge, and was looking to get some advice. I have a few ideas for preliminary details, but I want some feedback on my ideas. 1) Presale of tickets. We would limit it to 50 people at $30 ticket. 2) Have between 6 - 8 beers of a certain style. The more tickets we sell, the more beers we get. I was thinking stouts. 3) Have a raffle for $5 a ticket for a rare beer, and some $1 a ticket for some uncommon beers. Also have a few door prizes in the price of admission. 4) Have some food. Pizza, subs, something like that. 5) Try to limit the cost of beer to $15 a person, to make hopefully around $15 in profit a person. Let me know what you think. Any suggestions would be helpful, like how to get the beer, should I try to find a distributor to provide it or buy it off the shelf, insurance requirements, anything. Thanks in advance
my advice- try and have a spread of styles, esp. if not everyone is a beer geek. Stay local, it's cheaper and better for the local community.
I belong to a few homebrew clubs, so having a style specific tasting would probably interest a lot of them. Plus who doesn't love stouts? But I was also thinking of doing a Michigan Tasting if this one works out after this one.
I just did this sort of thing. I held a beer tasting and BBQ fund raiser. I had 6 IPAs for the tasting and then also had a southern BBQ meal with kegs of beer for people to drink. I charged $50 (people were fine with that much since it was a fund raiser and actually a lot of people told me I should have charged more). I limited it to 40 people, mostly had to do with where I was holding it and my wife and I were doing everything including cooking the food. I chose IPAs because I like them and because this was the 2nd year I've done it and the first year was "craft" beer and I chose a beer from each style. I did find that 6 seemed to be the limit for the number of beers to taste for people who really had no idea about the style. I did have good local IPAs as well as some from around the country that I had people send me for the tasting. For the Kegs I chose an IPA, Pale Ale and a Porter. Sounds like a lot but I have a kegerator so any left over I was willing to drink. I didn't do the raffle but it did cross my mind. The reason I chose not to was that the majority of the people going probably weren't going to appreciate the "rare" beer that I would have provided and I didn't know if I would recover the cost of acquiring the bottles with a raffle. My wife and I also chose to eat the cost and donate all the money to the cause. It wasn't as much as you would think and it is also tax deductible. Not sure if that helps. Feel free to BM me and I can go into more details.
Since your into homebrewing how about a "Clone" theme, I've thought of this often since I like to (try to) brew "clones" myself. You get some brewers to pick a local beer and clone in, and the tasters try to guess which one is the clone and what one they like best. I'd pay 30 bucks to be part of that
