East Anglian Beer Festival

You haven't been to Rotherham then, where the schoolgirls use the school's sewing machines to stitch perforations through the tokens! Good practice, don't you think!

We find that most customers buy pretty much what they need leaving less than

We did it in our second year and it didn't cost a lot but the move to strike through cards made this redundant anyway.

Sounds like a H&S issue with all those sewing machines waiting to trip up the customers.

"PeterE" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:

The only festival I've been to in the last couple of years is the one at Portsmouth Guildhall (August 18th/19th this year I believe), where most people are seasoned enough to gauge fairly accurately how many tokens they will get through. There is also a tendency for many to leave enough in hand for a late-night surge to the bottled beer stand for a couple of takeaways. It can get chaotic as time nears and bottles start to run out on the Saturday night.

Stuart Crow

and why a single price is best of all.If you have a good range of beers and ciders on offer they will all sell.There's no point at all in pricing differently .If a lower price made people attracted to the weaker beers they would sell out first , if on the fixed price system buyers went for the stronger ones they would sell out first.But this doesn't happen in either case.People simply buy what interests them regardless of value.It's best to spend time and effort serving customers quickly and giving good advice rather than tinkering about with irrelevant oddments just because pubs do it that way. We have met proponents of differential pricing at the festival.They have all been surprised at how our system works and the unanimous support of our visitors to it.All their objections were seen to be unfounded.

Sorry Vale but I am unable to get my head round the idea that it is acceptable to sell Harvey's Mild (3%) for the same price as Burton Bridge Thomas Sykes Ale (10%).

Ah, that's our one exception! We had Baz' Bonce Blower at 11% ABV two years ago and it went for £2 the half.It didn't sell well so the remainder was dropped into a pin and sold at another beer festival a month later. Apart from that we have kept the flat rate , we normally go up to 6 or

I visited a beer festival at the Black Lion,Radcliffe on Trent yesterday.28 ales plus cider are on offer. It was most gratifying to see that most visitors were young people. The pricing - and this is a pub - was £1 a half but you get 11 for the price of 10. I asked the landlord about the pricing and his answer was pretty well what I've always maintained-that the circumstances in a festival are totally different from those inside the pub and it was utterly pointless to waste time on differentiating when he would sell all the beer anyway. Smart move-three 9s of cask conditioned lager from Oldershaw's brewery in Grantham.This gets the lager drinkers started and then it's suggested they try some others.

At Cambridge I was very happy that there was a single price for Cider & Perry of £2.40, this made change easy to calculate at was liked by staff and customers.

Anyone asking for "the strongest of whatever" received extra scrutiny on age and behaviour.

We did have a request for whichever Cider goes with Stout!

TC

Phil Clark wrote:

snipped-for-privacy@logicacmg.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@h76g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

When I ws a young man, that was quite a common combination.

Re cider and stout when I was younger I remember drinklng Guinness and mixed cider, it was the poor mans version of Black Velvet which is really Guinness and Champagne.

Peter