It was a surprisingly cold and not-so-surprisingly rainy day in late April as we joined the…read morerapidly-growing General Admission line to enter the 2nd Annual Air Capital Bacon and Beer Festival. I've been to more than a few of these beer events over the past few years, both in Wichita and other parts of the United States; as my nose was going numb and my I was huddled underneath the umbrella I keep in my car, I started thinking about where the Beer and Bacon Festival went wrong.
The tone was set when I bought tickets, because the venue uses Ticketmaster, which means that a $30 ticket ended up being a $40.30 ticket after applying tax and mystery fees. Ticket prices increased to $35 if you bought at the door, so I was going to be paying about $40 either way. There's plenty of digital options for ticketing nowadays, such as Eventbrite, that don't try to nickel-and-dime customers like the historically craptastic Ticketmaster, but if I had to guess, Hartman probably just used the ticketing solution they use for every other event, even if a general admission event like this doesn't need a complex system for assigning seats like you would need for a Flo Rida or Brian Wilson concert.
Getting into the Hartman Arena seemed to be taking a long time, and it was obvious why upon reaching the front of the line where I emptied my pockets so I could be swiped by a handheld metal detector. Regardless of how you feel about your civil liberties or whatever, I get the desire to protect large groups of people in close quarters. I thought back to my security experience at other beer events, ranging from walk-through metal detectors to no search at all, though none of them took as long as these security guards: it doesn't take a math genius to look at the ~30 seconds it was taking each person to get through one of the two security lines, apply that to the 200-person line, and realize that Person #200 is going to be waiting in line for 50 minutes. Worse is that the event organizers opened up a side door in an attempt to get people out of the rain, but they weren't subjected to nearly the same level of security theater as those of us in the main line.
Beer is typically poured at these events from bottles (for those breweries who bottle) or from makeshift tap solutions for enterprising breweries that go to the trouble of making them. Many of the smaller local Wichita breweries participating at this event brought kegs and were served from a trailer that had a series of taps installed on the sides. It was a great way of including a lot of smaller breweries, though the supply was much more constrained - some of the breweries serving from the trailer were tapped out within half an hour of GA (23rd Street Brewery), and over half of them within the first 90 minutes of GA (Defiance, Salt City, Third Place, Three Rings). Those that poured from bottles had better supply, though even they had supply issues - Goose Island, one of the several AB Inbev breweries featured (Kona, Blue Point, and Elysian are also owned wholly or in part by the mega-corporation) ran out of beer fairly quickly. I didn't stay until the end of the event, but judging by some comments on their Facebook page it appears as if there wasn't much beer remaining by the last hour.
Many beer tasting events give you a glass at the beginning and the vendors pour samples into the glass. This event chose to use plastic cups, which ended up generating a lot of waste and overflowing trash cans. There's downsides to using reusable glasses: you need to supply each station with water to rinse out the glasses, dump buckets to put the water (and any leftover beer from visitors), and you can't have the samples poured ahead of time, which shortens the beer lines a little bit. Conversely, you can better control the amount of beer in each sample (many events add a 3-5oz line on the glass and instruct pourers to fill to the line), and better plan out how much beer you'll need based upon the ticket sales. Plus I think it's a little more environmentally-friendly, especially when souvenir pint glasses were already made and given to attendees as they were leaving (although pint glasses are the worst kind of glass for actually serving beer and with a dozen of similar pint glasses already gathering dust in my cupboard I would have liked to have seen, like, a tulip glass or something).
Continued below...
