Hospitality Night - Worth volunteering our club?

[mpietropaoli]

Trying to find more info on what goes on...all I can really find is that it sounds like club night, but it goes on all the time, and clubs do 2-3 hour shifts...

I feel like this might be like high school where I rather be a guest @ the party than host the party :-)

[tschmidlin]

I know what you're saying, but it only works if the local clubs volunteer for a shift.  It's only a couple of hours, and you get the stage to serve your beers to the masses.

[dean_palmer]

Not sure what they mean by "hospitality night" but there are many events around my area where homebrew clubs are invited to set up to serve their beer and promote the hobby and the club. Most of these events are excellent, and some clubs cover the cost of ingredients for the brewers who donate a keg of their beer. It's usually a great way to promote the hobby, but unless the audience is really geared to home and craft beer folks, it can be that you are just handing out free beer to folks who could care less about homebrewing or the club. Find out the details and go from there :-)

[bluesman]

It's now called Social Club, but we know it as Hospitality Suite. As Tom said, it's a chance for your club to showcase your beer. It's also a special time for your club to be in the limelight and your club's chance to nationally recognized. I encourage your club to participate as it's a great way to meet/greet homebrewers from abroad and get to be on the homebrewer's center stage.

Go for it! 

[mtnrockhopper]

Think of it as hosting a giant homebrew club meeting.

[narvin]

During any downtime at NHC (including 11pm to 2am... who needs sleep!), everyone heads to the hospitality suite.  Homebrew clubs take shifts, usually a few hours long, and take over all of the taps to showcase their club's beer.  It's like club night but you don't have to worry about decorations, and you'll be the only one (or one of two clubs) there so you get the spotlight.  I would definitely recommend doing it if you can drive to the conference... shipping kegs when it's all the way across the country is a PITA and very expensive.

[svejk]

I think it is probably worth checking with your club to see how much beer you all would like to serve at the conference.  In our case, we had all been focused on the conference for over a year so we had lots of collaborations and barrel aged beers that we wanted to serve in addition to the beers that we had brewed for the competition.  We set up a google document where we all logged what beers we had in the pipeline that would be available for the conference.  We had over 60 possible beers, and there was no way we could serve that many at Club Night, so taking on a couple of Hospitality Shifts was no problem. 

As the other folks have mentioned, if you can drive to the conference, then it is a great way to do your part to make the event a success.

[bonjour]

No 1 club can handle the entire Social Club by themselves, so see what you can do and let the organizer know so he can line up the correct number of clubs to meet demand.  You are not in this alone.