Beer, Bourbon, and Barbeque Festival

Beer, Bourbon, and Barbeque Festival

A. Thoroughly describe the event using your new event vocabulary.

The Beer, Bourbon, and Barbeque festival is part of an east coast barbeque contest tour. They travel up and down the east coast from New York to Georgia, Tennessee to Maryland. They come to all different types of venues, indoor, as well as outdoor, to cook and serve micro brewed beer and bourbon and compete for who has the best barbeque team. Each of the different festivals has different sponsors, vendors, and volunteers. They have multiple contests at each of the festivals along with live music of all different genres. This festival goes on for 2 days. They do a pig roast on Friday night and have all of the live music and contests on Saturday. They have beer and bourbon connoisseurs that give small information sessions to better educate beginners like myself.

B. What were WOW factors?

One of the major WOW factors for me at this event was most certainly the pig roast, well that and the beer belly contest. The pig roast was held on Friday night, they cook up about a dozen pigs and pull the meat and serve barbeque to everyone that bought a ticket to eat, which we definitely did. The beer belly contest was one of those things that you wanted to see but you weren't quite sure why. It is a contest that there is no entry fee for, they have to get up on stage without a shirt on and they measure your belly. Whoever has the biggest belly wins a trophy and is crowned the reigning champ, also they are asked to return for the following years contest so that the new contenders can have a go at beating him.

C. Identify and explain specific inputs and outputs of the event you attended.

The inputs would be the volunteers, the event management company, the sponsors, the vendors. The money to set up all of the booths for the vendors as well as the electrical equipment for the bands, Depending on how they set up for dining, they would have to pay to supply the tables and chairs. The money that it cost to print the t-shirts, glasses, and other merchandise sold that was directly sponsoring this event. Some of the outputs would be all of the vendors in attendance and the possibility of bringing in more next year. I was very surprised at the number of vendors that they did have. They did have some local newspapers there, so hopefully it will draw in more people next year and possibly bring in more sponsors. The printing of the glasses and t-shirts was also a very viable way to advertise this specific type of event, and possibly get people interested in looking up the information for future dates.

D. Identify all of the "stakeholders" who were apparent to you.

I would say that the most important stakeholders for this event had to be the sponsors. Residence Inn, The Beer Connoisseur Magazine, and Yelp were all sponsors of the festival. The almost 50 exhibitors were also major stakeholders. The event planning company, Trigger Agency, along with their hired staff would have been a stake holder not to mention the volunteers that helped to do the cleanup and set up, as well as, the Koka Booth Amphitheater, where the festival was held.

E. Which of the environmental forces and trends that affect events applied to the event you attended? Explain.

Some of the trends that I immediately noticed were the utilization of technology, increase and outreach to population by social network. They have gotten on board with trying to make the process of attending this event as painless as possible; they have done this by making technology a key point in speeding up the process of checking in as a an attendee. They had multiple people at the entrance gate scanning tickets, whether purchased online, onsite, or at some of the select locations that were selling them. They have also gotten on the social media train by advertising the event immensely on multiple websites and social media sites of affiliated groups. I do feel that since this is in such a rural location that offering an event to facebookers allowed this to be advertised to a vast majority in a short period of time for very little money.

F. Evaluate the event in terms of (1) venue settings, (2) food and beverage, (3) technical support, and (4) service quality.

1. The venue was a very nice pick for the type of event. It offered all of the space that was needed for the amount of people in attendance, as well as the events that took place. The layout that was depicted by the organizer was a poor design and could have been better, but the venue was an overall good pick.

2. The food was impeccable. I don't think that I have ever had barbeque that was so delicious and different, there were so many different types of barbeque vendors there, and there was no way that you could have tasted it all. The alcohol that was there for tasting was also amazing, they did have a few known brands there, such as ShockTop beer, Blue Moon Beer, Makers Mark bourbon, and Jim Beam bourbon were also there. I personally like to stay away from what I already know; to me the point in going to festivals like this is to try different things.

3. There was not a whole lot of technical support there other than the scanners that they used for check in and the audio equipment for the bands and speakers, so all in all I don't recall noticing any problems.

4. Everyone there was so amazing, the volunteers where everywhere assisting