Great Divide Brewing - Sept. 16

In preparation for the big festivities next week, we're mainly messing around with the small details.

Each full-time employee at the brewery is scheduled to work a session at GABF, and we just got that all figured out. As much as we appreciate the volunteer servers at GABF, I think that it's important to have brewery employees at the event to pour. We schedule 2 or 3 employees per session. I have a lot of customers tell me throughout the year that they came by our table at GABF and they actually talked to someone from the brewery instead of a volunteer. It stands out in their memory because it's important for them.

I've reminded the draft department at our distributor to be sure that our draft lines in the downtown area have been recently cleaned. With the large number of beer drinkers in town for the festival it's an important detail. Normally, draft lines are cleaned every 2 to 3 weeks (of course we prefer every 2 weeks, but every 3 weeks becomes the reality). I've asked that the downtown draft accounts be cleaned so there aren't any out there that are past 10 days. Draft beer lines are an integral part of delivering a great tasting pint to the consumer. There's no sense in putting a fine draft beer through a mangy line.

Accounts, friends, distributor salespeople and a few others are coming out of the woodwork and starting to call us looking for tickets. We do what we can ... some will get tickets from us, some won't. Most people don't know that the breweries have to pay for tickets just like the rest of the public. We do buy extra tickets every year so that we can take care of a few special people. Safe to say that if our banker calls for tickets ... we'll find some.