Needing help in setting up a competition of local home brewers in the Waukesha County Wisconsin.
Any suggestions will help me setting up the competition. Is it legal to charge an admission fee for the general public. We would have food and entertainment but want to offer local home brewers a platform of competition with trophies and other types of awards.
How much time needed for brewer's to be able to respond.
Thank you I look forward to your input
Perry Woolley
Mukwonago WI
(There is a competition sub-forum here:
https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?board=23.0 )
What is your goal...are you a homebrewer, or a club, or a business trying to create an event to generate income?
Our club's competition will be 10 years old this year (two weeks from now), and is held in conjunction with the Maryland Microbrewery Festival, which is organized and hosted by a separate organization and which invites our participation. The festival charges admission, but the judging is done in a closed building out of the public eye.
It requires a handful of people and good cat-herding skills. We have an Organizer (me), a Head Judge, a Head Steward, a Registrar, and a Cellar Master. And that's just for the beer part...we also have a food committee made up of several Spousal Units who prepare a bunch of breakfast dishes for the approximately 30-35 Judges, Stewards, and staff who are needed on judging day.
We charge entrants $8 per entry, and judge about 100 entries on the morning of the festival. That requires a minimum of 20 judges (two judges per entry, assuming an average of 10 beers per flight/pair of judges), and pretty much takes up a full morning judging session. Then we do Best of Show in the afternoon. Our club has experienced homebrewers who are not BJCP Judges but serve as judges and whom we pair with ranked Judges, and we also get several area professional brewers to help with judging. So at least one BJCP Judge or professional brewer per entry.
If you are planning a legit competition with BJCP judges, so that entrants get proper feedback, and judges get credit for their efforts, go to bjcp.org where you will find documents about how to run a competition. If/when you register your competition with the BJCP, you will receive spreadsheets of all active BJCP judges, and provisional judges, so you can solicit judges for your competition.
6-8 weeks' notice for registrants is fairly standard. We *always* experience a very annoying circumstance where people register for the competition, and take up entry slots, but never complete or submit their entries. So, we account for that by setting the software to accept a few more registrations than we would actually prefer, knowing there will be no-shows.
Depending on who/what you are and what your goals are, I would suggest that you *not* plan on making money on a homebrew competition. Judges pretty much expect breakfast and lunch. Entrants expect prizes and/or ribbons. You'll also have expenses for tasting cups, printing for score sheets, flight sheets, cover sheets, bottled water, crackers or bread, publicity, registration software (we pay for hosted brew competition service), etc. If you get Sponsors to donate prizes, food, etc., then you can actually come out ahead.
I'm pretty sure that the general public around here would *not* pay to attend a stand-alone homebrew competition, unless they got to drink beer for their entry fee. Entertainment...hmmm...most judges want to be away from noise and distractions while they're doing their thing. I've judged at State Fairs which are in public or semi-public settings, and while that can be entertaining for a little while, it's not a great idea, it's distracting and can slow things way down.
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