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Contents:
  Your message was deleted by a security rule ("interscan MSS")
  Re: Madison's Great Taste (Bill Rogers)
  MCAB VI competition ("Spencer W. Thomas")


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Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 18:29:36 +0200
From: "interscan MSS" <interscanviruswall at fr.ch>
Subject: Your message was deleted by a security rule

Your message was deleted by a security rule:

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Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:01:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Rogers <bill6beers at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Madison's Great Taste

Jerry "Beaver" Pelt asks about this year's Great Taste of the Midwest 
ticket sales.  

Sorry about the delay in responding, but I was out for a week in the 
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota where, 
thankfully, they have not yet installed internet cafes.

The Great Taste of the Midwest craft beer festival is organized and run 
by the Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild, a non-profit homebrew 
club.  Like your homebrew club, we're a hobby club consisting of a 
bunch of (mostly) guys with day jobs and families to nurture, but 
probably unlike your club we also put on a beer festival that many 
consider one of the primo beer events of the year.  We're all 
volunteers and we do the best we can given the time our lives permit.  
I've been surprised to learn that some of our brewers -- and perhaps 
customers -- think our festival is run by a professional organization, 
with staff.  It's not, though we appreciate the compliment.  

We were inundated with ticket orders this year from people abiding by 
the instructions we gave.  Our mailbox would not hold all the orders we 
receved on May 1, such that the post office had piles of our mail 
sitting in baskets on the floor when we arrived for pickup.  They were 
a little peeved at us!  There was little we could do but fill the 
orders as best we could.  Unfortunately Jerry's envelope was not chosen 
for filfillment, and we do apologize.  With the mail volume we received 
May 1, and the heavy in-person sales, we declared the festival a 
sellout in 5 hours.  

I was one of the Friday night "Midnight Madness" sellers at Wonder's 
Pub in Madison. The larger orders (of 10-20) that night all looked 
honestly like people who'd gathered money at work or from their friends 
to come buy tickets.  There were a lot of used bills of various 
denominations, and non-consecutive serial numbers.  Maybe I'm naive but 
I really think there was not a lot of scalping buying going on.  

Ticket sales will NOT be done on eBay, at least not by us.  We'll be 
watching eBay over the summer as we did last year.  Nobody in 2003 was 
selling tickets repeatedly, i.e., there were no repeat sellers.  It 
appeared to be the genuine "my friends can't come" kind of selling.  We 
hope it will be the same this year.  Regardless, we'll be watching.  
The first seller was  "elite_digger" and I'll be looking for repeats 
from that seller.  I don't know what action we can take against eBay 
scalpers, but we're investigating.  We do NOT want our festival's good 
name besmirched by scumbag scalpers, whether online or outside the 
festival.  Madison has anti-scalping laws and the uniformed Madison 
police at the festival will be alerted to the potential presence of 
scalpers.  

Sales have really taken off over the last three years.  Our success has 
its failings.  Not so long ago the Great Taste didn't sell so quickly 
and many longtime beer lovers enjoyed the benefit of those days.  Now 
the word is out and tickets are scarce.  We are committed to the 
quality of the Great Taste and will not grow it by selling more 
tickets.  We've found that the ratio of 104 brewers to 5000 patrons is 
a good one.  A few years ago we sold 5500 tickets and noticed (and 
received comments) that the event was getting too crowded.  And ... the 
brewers have told us in post-event surveys that they don't want to go 
to two days.  Extend the event, and we lose many of the fine brewers 
who make this such a great event.  It'll stay this size for a while.  

Watch our website for ticket info for next year.  For what it's worth, 
all ticket selling parameters will be reviewed before next year's 
festival.  Expect changes ... just like the weather in the Minnesota 
wilderness!  

Bill Rogers,
President
Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild
Madison, WI
http://mhtg.org
greattaste at mhtg.org

For a related article, see columnist Doug Moe's May 11 column in 
Madison's Capital Times newspaper:
http://snipurl.com/72rb


=====
Where are you, John Galt?


	
		


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Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:17:30 -0400
From: "Spencer W. Thomas" <spencer at umich.edu>
Subject: MCAB VI competition

The Masters Championship of Amateur Brewing VI competition will take 
place July 23-25 at Dragonmead Microbrewery in Warren, Michigan (near 
Detroit.)  Our program includes a sensory evaluation seminar led by Rex 
Halfpenny and VIP admission to the Michigan Brewers Guild Summerfest.  
It's gonna be a blast. See the MCAB VI web site at 
http://dragon.ldmi.net/MCAB/ for details.

Our attempt to email the call for judges using email addresses provided 
by the BJCP resulted in a huge number of bounced emails.  So if you're a 
BJCP judge, and you did not get the call for judges in your email, 
please visit http://spencerwthomas.com/mcab/

A note about email addresses: If you are a BJCP judge and live in the 
Michigan/Illinois/Indiana/Ohio region or if you are a National or 
higher-ranked judge, and did not get an email from me, it is possible 
that the BJCP has an out of date email address for you.  If you write to 
me, I can check your current email against the list I have, but you 
might do better to write directly to the BJCP program administrator 
program_admin at bjcp.org to correct it in their database.

Thanks, and I hope to see you here in July!

=Spencer
spencer at umich.edu


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