Hey Team!

Raise your hand if you miss drinking beers with 900 of your friends on the slopes on MRG!!

We are so bummed that we can’t SIP in person this year; we miss you! We miss doing all the things that we have to do to make SIP happen. We miss our crew of volunteers who would shlep up the gear, bang in the fencing and stuff glasses with tokens. We miss hanging our Sponsor banners off the upper deck. We miss watching all the brewers and food trucks rolling in with big smiles on their faces, ready to serve up their goods. We miss watching the entrance line grow while the band does sound check. We miss handing out the glasses and watching the festivities start. We miss the music and the food and the BEER! And raffle for Stark Mountain Foundation and the team photo! We miss playing corn hole and the race to find everything in the scavenger hunt and the folks rocking SIPtemberfest shirts from years past. We even miss checking the portolets and the post event clean up. We miss every single thing about SIP, most especially you all!

Then we were asked to “do something online.”

*Slight Cringe* See, what you have to understand about that is we’re not really into zooming or whatever. We’re of the VCR and stick-shift generation. We mean no disrespect to the online beer fest thing, we just literally don’t understand it. But we are reasonably savvy on the Facebonk and Instathingy. And like we said, we miss you all! Plus everyone could probably use some positive vibes these days so here’s what we’re going to do:

• Share your SIP pictures, videos and SIP memories with us on Facebonk and Instathingy. Share old or current pictures with you and your friends (or your dogs – we love dogs!) at SIP or in SIP shirts or drinking from SIP glasses. Or share SIP stories, or ask us questions about SIP!?
• Share and/or tag us (and your favorite SIP brewers etc,) as much as you like between now and Saturday, September 26, 4pm. Shortly after then, we will announce a some WINNERS from everyone who posted. Winners will each get a pair of SIPVIP tickets to 2021!
• We have some categories in mind like Best Beer Pic, Best Pet, Best Team Photo, maybe an award for the oldest SIP (anyone have pictures from 2008?) We will probably award at least 2-3 pairs of SIPVIP tickets. But that will be a game time decision; it all depends how many entries we get…!

So, how do you like them online beer skills? We will be online periodically and then from 2:30-4:30 on Saturday. Please join us for some socially distanced beer sipping and scrolling through pictures and stories from SIP over the years. Maybe for your effort you’ll get some free tickets to next year!

See below for the things you need to know and a gallery of a few SIP pictures dating back to 2009, (we couldn’t find 2008 images tho – they are probably “real” photos, like from a roll that had to be developed and stuff…)

We can’t wait to see what you post, and we super-dooper can’t wait until this time next year when hopefully we will be neck deep working on SIP 2021!

Cheers!

-TEAM SIP

—The Things—

-Pictures and/or videos should show the SIP logo and/or scene.
-Entries can be from any year (the older the better!) on up to what would have been SIP 2020, Saturday September 26 at 4pm.
-Please include a date and description of the entry.
-Share to our Facebonk Page and/or tag us on Instathingy.
-Entrants must have rights to post images. Please don’t post other people’s images without permission.
-Enter as much as you like.
-Entrants must be over 21 yrs old.
-At least one pair of SIPVIP tickets will be awarded. Winners will be selected at the discretion of the SIPtemberfest Team.

—Memory Lane—

Mad River Glen Siptemberfest Dinner – September 27, 2013

photo credit: Jennifer Langille

featuring specialty brews from some of Vermont premier breweries

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We miss you guys so much!

Raise your hand if you think 2020 so far has been a proverbial drain pour.

We knew this year was going to be interesting when we needed to come up with a temporary location. Little did we know then that a global pandemic would alter reality as we know it and ‘social distancing’ would become a thing.

As of now, due to a whole slew of concerns related to COVID-19, the 2020 SIPtemberfest is cancelled. We are totally open to the idea of a group cheers or something online but we are not that savvy with all this Zoomy stuff and we can’t think that far ahead right now anyway. So for the time being, SIP is cancelled this year but we hope to be back in 2021.

Please read the below letter from our trusty captain and say a little beer prayer for us! We will be so incredibly stoked to kick it with you all as soon as we can!

Bonne Santé!!!

Dear Everyone,

Planning events is my jam. I love figuring out the puzzle of how to pull off the best beer fest/art show/wedding ever and nothing is sweeter than when I nail it. But this job is difficult and requires a lot of mental agility under ordinary circumstances. Now, in the wake of COVID-19, we face a whole new level of complexity and we are just starting to learn what that even means.

Event planners globally are scrambling to figure out what will become of our industry, (i.e. our livelihoods,) in the foreseeable future. But nobody really knows when it will be safe to hold large gatherings, what new restrictions and/or protocols will have to be initiated, what liability planners could face, and whether anyone will even feel comfortable attending events. I can tell you first hand that uncertainty of this scope is a logistics nightmare for any event planner. For a one-woman business like Meg’s Events, these unknowns are pretty much deal-breakers.

Sadly, this is all to say that the 2020 season of Meg’s Events is a big, fat, disappointing drain pour. I am cancelling SIPtemberfest, Bear North and probably the Moretown Artisans’ Sale too. My client events such as the Waterbury Arts Fest and others are also cancelled.

I have tried so hard to maintain my cool and not make rash decisions based on the massive dumpster fire of ‘information’ available out there. But after considering all the variables from timing and financial risks, to the health and safety of my friends, family and community, I feel the most responsible thing I can do is flush my 2020 event season and hope that the future has better things in store.

Man, I really hope I am able to weather this storm and bring Meg’s Events back to life next year! In the meantime, I will be navigating the waters as best I can and I hope you can do the same.

Please stay healthy and safe, and also be kind to each other! I look forward to raising a pint with you all down the road!

Meg

You guys!! We have news.

And by news, we mean big, big, important news!

Mad River Glen, our beloved and rustic home for 12 years, will be undergoing some much needed construction and renovations this summer. We have been working closely with the mountain to understand the scope of their plans and we’ve looked very carefully at all the ways this could impact our event. After a lot of discussion we’ve come to the conclusion that we are better off relocating our event for the year.

This is massive, we know. And we have not made this decision lightly. Mad River Glen is an integral part of our identity and we really wanted to keep our event on the mountain. But at the end of the day, we think the choice to relocate our 2020 event is by far the easiest thing we can do for everyone’s sake.

So we are excited to announce that the 2020 SIP will take place Saturday, September 26 at Kenyon’s Variety in Waitsfield. We decided on Kenyon’s for reasons similar to why we love MRG: this working farm is old-fashioned and no-frills to the core, and they are an independently owned and family run business. Since they already host several other events annually in their fields and they now keep a tent up all summer, we think this venue will be the perfect place for SIP to set up camp!

And speaking of camp, the spaciousness of these fields offers us a few exciting, one-time opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise have in the base area of MRG, like having artist booths and maybe even camping! Please click here to take our survey and help us gauge interest in these ideas… Plus one lucky entrant will win a SIP Hoodie & Hat! Your feed back will help us gauge all the options and make the most informed plans possible, so we’d love to learn what you all think!

Ultimately we plan to do what we always do – make SIPtemberfest the same but better! We still plan on having only one session, with about the same number of brewers pouring their delicious beer, and about the same number of attendees hanging out with that easygoing vibe. We will still have awesome food and killer live music. And we will still allow well behaved, leashed dogs and underagers!

We will announce all the event details before tickets go on sale, probably May/June-ish. This will include ticket pricing and start of sales date. As usual, we will offer a couple pop up ticket sales prior to the start of online sales, but we still have some tinkering to do before we can confirm this info, so stand by.

So please take our survey, follow us on instagram and look for more information from us in the spring!

Thanks as always for your continued support and cheers!

-Team SIP