UPDATE: June 1st - 1:00AM
What a night. We were happily overwhelmed with people wanting to sample
Alabama's best beers and support Free The Hops in the process... and we thank
you very, very much. Thank you to everyone who came out tonight for the first
session.
And a special thanks to our restaurant partners who fed such a huge number of
people. I think anyone who bought "Food + Beer" tickets and got to
enjoy the East End Food Court tonight would tell you we got it right. No one
had to wait more than a minute or two for any food item in the food court,
period. We promised we'd fix that after the problems last year, and I am happy
to report to all of you planning on coming out Sunday afternoon that the proof
is in the pudding. You'll really enjoy the food this year.
Of course, we are still a very young event (only in our second year!) and we are
still experiencing growing pains. The MCBF is a one of a kind event in Alabama,
and even people involved with it who have many years of experience with large
scale events have been surprised by the issues that have tripped us up.
Tonight, the snafu was the Will Call window.
We had unheard of advance TicketMaster sales from noon on Friday through 3pm
Saturday, and all of those had to go to will call. No one involved had ever
seen that sort of will call tsunami for an event like this. It caught us off
guard, so much so that some people walked away rather than continue to wait in
line to get in. We are very sorry for the long wait some experienced to get in
the gate.
But good news: we already have a plan to fix things for tomorrow. That's a big
reason why we split the event between two days this year instead of packing it
all into one day. It gives us time to identify issues and fix them right away.
For all of you planning on making it out to the Sunday session, here's what
you can expect:
Tonight we only had one gate open most of the night. On Sunday we will have 3
gates in operation.
We are consolidating multiple Will Call lists that confused and slowed down that
window into one Will Call list, and will triple the personnel handling Will
Call tickets.
If you have not bought tickets yet, be aware that tickets will go on sale at the
gate at 1:30pm. We strongly recommend you arrive at 1:30, at which time you
will be able to get your tickets and enter Sloss. You still won't be able to
start tasting beer until 3:00, but you'll be ideally positioned to get in to
start enjoying the beer right at 3:00.
IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A HARD COPY TICKET, please go to the gate
immediately to the right of the main gate. That gate will be reserved for
patrons who have printed tickets, and you will get immediate access. You should
not have to wait at all if you already have your tickets in hand.
In addition to all of this we are going to reduce the total number of tickets
sold for the Sunday session by 20% over what we sold for Saturday. That will
allow us to run a smoother operation overall. For those of you who endured a
long wait at the event any point on Saturday, please accept our sincere
apologies. We really are doing our best and learning some important lessons as
we continue to evolve this one-of-a-kind event. Every time we spot an issue, we
fix it as soon as we can. We believe we will have the kinks ironed out for the
Sunday session, and we can take those lessons and apply them next year as well.
THANK YOU AGAIN to everyone who made the Saturday Session such an amazing event.
Free The Hops appreciates your support. Now I need to get some sleep before
tomorrow's session...

Danner Kline
MCBF Coordinator
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