East Anglian Beer Festival

Following on from Dan's message. . .

How does £2.90 ish a pint (2.40 say + entrance divided over 4 pints) encourage non real-ale fans to have a go? Anybody know what the CAM in Camra stands for? No products either. Not even GBGs for sale. Many of the beers were suffering from being far too fresh.

I think it would be a kindness if Chappel was killed-off as well.

The week before I was at East Mersea BF. £2.00/pt, no entrance, free entertainment suited to the occasion. Well done to those involved. (Not an official Camra event but all the usual suspects were working efficiently and cheerfully.) Good beer too. We have a collection of brilliant brewers in Essex.

I bet you folk who look to sign-up members at Camra events are looking forward to trying to get bank details off prospective new members now a cheque or cash is not acceptable.

A whole £2 entrance fee! Oh how terrible!! Overpriced? I didn't think so! Have you seen the price of beer in the Bury area these days? £3.10 for a pint of Guinness, £2.80 for Abbot. Plus, all the proceeds go to charity. How many places in the area can you choose from a range of 60 real ales??! I don't think many people were put off by prices, state of beer etc etc. I queued for nearly an hour to get in!! It's rare enough to find anything other than Greene King in Bury, so this must be encouraged!

I certainly enjoyed it, and I'm sure others did too.

Dan

"Peter Fox" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@eminent.demon.co.uk...

The Melton Beer Festival manages to charge £2 a pint (even for Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby) with no entry fee except on Sat evening when there's a band on.It's not a village hall , there's loads of room and parking for 1000 cars. Even at that price there is a handsome profit made.

And your point is?

The point is why are BFs charging so much (to the detriment of the whole raison d'etre) when Melton proves it doesn't have to be like that?

If you look at my OP you'll see the price paid is approx 50p above normal street prices per pint. (Equivalent to 20% short measure.)

"Come to a CAMRA BF and be ripped-off" Good campaign slogan I'd say.

Silly nonsense. I don't know many pubs that charge £2 a pint for a 6% beer. Would you like to forward evidence that "so many" CAMRA BFs are charging above average for beer?

We charge a flat rate per half at the festival.Some CAMRA members argue that this will undermine sales of lower ABV beers . We have looked long and hard for any evidence that visitors choose beers on the basis of value and that evidence just doesn't exist.At the end we have sold practically all the beer and have the same amount of monet in the tills as if we had priced beer on ABV. The savings on staff and customer stress were considerable however.In fact some of the strong beers cost us more than the lighter ones - IIRC we paid £68 for a 9 of Young's Special London Ale at 6.4%ABV.

That strikes me as very sensible, but when I once mentioned this on the group after an evening fumbling with small change, I was told all sorts of reasons why it Just Isn't Possible. Does anyone really choose beer at a festival purely on the basis of cost (excluding any atypical beers with "special" prices, obviously)?

No,we asked a lot of customers their views on it-they all agreed it was much easier for them as well as for us.They got served quicker and I can tell you that after a few hours behind the bar it's difficulr to remember how MANY glasses you're charging for never mind the price of each one!In fact we started off last year with a run on Belvoir Mild ! Obviously the customers simply bought the beers that sounded interesting , at £1 a time the price disappears from consideration.

I monitored sales of beers by gravity at different times of the festival and found that:

1. Most people start with weaker beers and move up the gravity range.
2. The sales year after year fit a distorted bell curve with a peak in the

So if you assume that the stronger beers are more expensive to buy in then we were selling them at a higher price. Therefore there is a correlation of sales with price, but then it could just be a correlation of sales with strength and the price matched. Many festivals don't bother examining the sales details enough to know one way or the other.

But if the economic price per pint goes up to, say, £2.20 a pint, then every transaction will involve fumbling with small change.

It only works if you can sell all beers at £2 a pint.

Though the same amount, and there will be none of the "hang on, was that a 1.05 and a 1.15, or a 1.15 and a 1.05..."

Actually last year we used tokens at £1 each so nobody serving had to handle cash at all.Easy enough to sell tokens at £1.10 each if necessary. I've heard of festivals which took this to ridiculous levels with £1,10pand 20p tokens! So they could charge £1.20 for stronger ales.But you have so many casks of beer and if you sell them all you don't need to charge this for brew A and that for brew B.

Indeed. The Coventry beer festival used to use tokens, but (and I quote) "when the natural price of a half pint became equal to a government issued beer token we used those"

This does not mean tokens will never be used again nor does it mean that the current pricing is one pound for every half. It's just easier at present to use the queens head token system for most beers and few are causing any change requirement *at present*

We did exactly this, although iot's 10 years ago now. Basically all beers were sold as low (yellow) medium (blue) or high (orange) price, and the beer names on the barrels were all on the right colour paper to indicate which tokens got you which.

You also make more money on sold but unused tokens...

Seems a lot of trouble to achieve nothing. Add up what your beer cost you , work out how much you should make with your markup and divide by the number of halves you expect to sell.That should be the token price.Differentiation adds to the work load but not to the till receipts.

It was a university one, so I think there was a need to stop those "inexperienced" attendees from just starting at Old Tom and doing themselves a mischief. None of the numbers were nice round ones anyway. Something like 1.20/pint 1.50/pint and 1.80/pint. 10 years ago, as I say...

Just a word in favour of the strike through card. No worries about handling dirty cash and its security problems, as quick as tokens but without the disadvantages and absolutely no problems with beers that are in 10p units. Oh yes you can use the card for advertising space so in effect they cost you zero.

Only one disadvantage - staff can end up with inky hands.

We've used cards at the last few Ipswich beer festivals and they certainly have advantages over cash.

One other disadvantage though, people tend not to regard them as being as valuable as cash and often leave large piles of them lying around where they can be pinched - a potential problem when a pile of cards could easily be worth several hundred quid.