I'd been looking forward to this event for a few weeks now. Booked the Saturday afternoon off work, arranged a hotel and arrived at 6.00pm to be turned away as there was limited amounts of beer left!!!!
For a national CAMRA event this is a joke. I didn't expect the full range to be available on the Saturday but according to one report the beer was as good as gone by 3.00pm.
Towards the end of last year on this newsgroup I suggested that the event would benefit from the sale of tickets, maybe making it a ticket only festival. I made this comment after standing in queues at the previous two festivals held in Manchester. The response was that this was a bigger venue so there wouldn't be a problem. Spot on, no queuing, just no beer.
I would argue that if any event is all ticket you are in a much better position to plan with things such as beer purchase.
All in all a very disappointing evening that was improved by a taxi ride to The Crescent.
Maybe CAMRA should reconsider holding the festival in Manchester, take it back to Burton, the last couple of years were great! johnnysaint
I wasn't involved in organising this festival, but there will always be teething troubles in the first year before you've been able to gauge the potential demand. The organisers were also seriously messed around by the hall very close to the festival date (hence the lack of hot meals).
If you're making a special trip to a particular beer festival it normally makes sense to avoid Saturday nights anyway, as at best the choice of beers will be reduced, at worst it will sell out well before the official closing time.
Making an event ticket only greatly reduces its campaigning value as in effect you're preaching to the converted.
Teething troubles? If beer ran out at 3.00 pm as suggested, then almost 25% of time available for the public was lost. A major error I would suggest. Was demand so significantly up from when the festival was previously held in Manchester, only 3 years ago?
I appreciate that attending on a Saturday evening is risky but in the 10 years of regularly attending festivals up and down the UK, almost exclusively on a Saturday evening, I've never once experienced beer running out so early in the day.
In this instance both members and non members were disappointed. Hardly a good way to convert people. If tickets are marketed and available well in advance anyone can obtain them. If keg drinkers queue for over an hour, like they had to at the last two festivals in the Upper Campfield Market, then I'm sure they will go to the efforts of buying a ticket in advance.
Just an idea, but how about running festivals from Thursday or Friday through to Sunday or Monday? This would make events far more accessible.
I would suggest that this is par for the course for any beer festival that is not attached to a pub. After all, the only ones I've been involved with that have had beer left on Saturday afternoon have been those that failed miserably. If you don't have an outlet for your beer on Sunday or thereafter, then you need to sell as much as you can before close of play on Saturday. It sounds as if they underestimated the impact of a change of venue on sales, and they should learn from that for next year.
Sorry that the beers ran out. It's hard to gauge demand. However the fact that they ran out is surely a sign that it was a bigger success than anticipated. I can't follow the reasoning that moving it back to Burton would help. Keep it in Manchester and provide more beer next time!
Thanks for your reply Christine but I beg to differ. In the last 2 years I've been to about 12 to 15 CAMRA festivals all of which have had beer right the way through to last thing on Saturday night, admittedly with reduced choice.
In fact, if my memory serves me right, the last two National Winter Ale Festivals held in Manchester, 3 or 4 years ago, had beer available up to closing time on Saturday. johnnysaint
It is soooo much easier to judge these things after your first event. The first Bromsgrove beer festival ran out at 6pm on the final day. The second festival had a little beer right to the end.
As various people have mentioned it is a venue change that is the main impact. Anyone with a crystal ball can plan perfectly but sadly no one has managed to get one working for these events as yet so everyone tends to guess and then use the first years figures to tailor the order for the next year.
I can tell you from experience that simply moving a festival to a different arrangement of rooms within the same venue has a bigger impact on beer sales than you would imagine. Moving to a totally new venue puts you in major guesstimate territory.
I think Christine is right in that this is not untypical for a successful festival. I've every sympathy with organisers struggling with the logistics of selling large amounts of beer and having none left over, but I think organizers often underestimate how pissed off people get when they arrive from some distance and find most of the beer has run out. Most experienced Camra festival-goers wouldn't dream of only visiting a BF on the last night, but non-members who rarely use festivals will expect all the beers to be available as advertised. These are the very people the festivals are supposed to be for.
Given the typical margin on a cask at a BF I think it would be better for organisers to order in the expectation of pouring 20% away. The festival would still make lots of money, there'd be a lot more headroom if the festival is busier than expected, and there'd be enough left for a good pissup for the volunteers at closing time.
Yes no seasoned beer fest attender would pick the last night but unfortunately those of us who have full time jobs and live away from the ares sometimes have no choice....
Further to the discussion on this ng, you might be interested in reading the comments made by the festival organiser to the Manchester Evening News on Monday:
===== begin quote ==== Real ale fans drink the beer fest dry
BY DON FRAME
HUNDREDS of disappointed drinkers had to go thirsty when one of the country's biggest real ale festivals ran out of beer.
Organisers of the Camra National Winter Ales Festival, sponsored by the M.E.N., were forced to shut the doors of the Manchester event five hours early. But even after the "lock-in", supplies of real ales dried up three hours before it was due to end on Saturday night.
Camra - the Campaign for Real Ale - which organised the four-day event, says it under-estimated demand.
But sponsorship manager Jim Flynn said: "It just shows what a huge success it was. Unfortunately, it was a victim of its own success.
QUEUES
"It's incredibly difficult to get it right and accurately predict demand. If you get it wrong you end up throwing it down the drain and going bankrupt or you run out.
"Though we have staged the festival in Manchester before, this was in effect a new event because it was held at the recently refurbished New Century House. It was a real learning curve for us.
"We had ordered a lot more ales than last time, but we had not anticipated how many would turn up or how long they would stay." There were queues outside the venue for 1.5 hours on Friday night, and queues when it re-opened for business at lunchtime on Saturday.
Mr. Flynn added: "There are many factors involved, such as the weather and other events that may be taking place in the same area.
"We had no choice but to stop people coming in shortly after 5pm on Saturday because we knew we were running out. We could have done with another few hundred pints.
"The real ales lasted until about 7.3Opm, and we had already had to re-order stocks of cider after a rush on Friday. Tickets were sold only at the door, so it wasn't a case of anyone having paid and being disappointed.
"We are optimistic about returning to Manchester next year, in which case we can promise that it will be bigger and better than ever. And we will try to ensure that we don't run out."
===== end quote ==== I hope this helps to explain what happened.
To all those that were faced with a lack of beer on the Saturday, I must apologise for being greedy by attending 3 sessions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. As well as a Friday evening session at Atherton.
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