Yes, there are NO MORE TICKETS TO SATURDAY! It’s true! There are still tickets to Friday’s Meet the Brewers Dinner and Tasting (which is going to be an amazing event – all beer geeks should try to attend this!) Thank you for the flowers and chocolates and lucrative trade opportunities, however, even if we wanted to sell more tickets we can’t. It’s a matter of having enough beer for everyone, as well as having enough space! We don’t want this SIPtemberfest to be Sardinefest!

Oh wait – but there are more tickets to Saturday! You have 2 more chances to WIN SIP VIP tickets (entry for two, including 10 tokens and a souvenir glass each, two t-shirts and more,) and all you have to do is enter one or both of our contests! Both are going on right now!

• WINNER HAS BEEN SELECTED! The first is a Caption Contest. Easy!! You can enter as many captions as you like. Follow this link for more info and to see the photo to caption. The winner will be announce on 9/9 at 9pm so while you have some time before the contest is over, why wait?
• The second contest is also ongoing – Swag Photo Contest. Take a photo of some SIPtemberfest swag – tshirts, glasses, coasters, tokens, etc – and email it to siptemberfest@madriver.com. We will post an album of them on Meg’s Events facebook page and the photo with the most likes will win! Entries should be submitted earlier than later – we’ll let you know when the cut off is.

So if you didn’t get your tickets to Saturday already, I can officially say “I told you so.” Sign up to get these posts emailed directly to you (‘Fresh SIPs’ on the top right hand part of this page) so you don’t miss out next year and then enter as much as you like for your chance to win tickets to this year!

Cheers and good luck!

Yes, yes. We had said Sunday would be the day we were going to share our Caption Contest photo so you could enter to win two SIP VIP packages to Saturday’s event. But we decided to postpone that until today – the Anniversary of the Irene Floods.

A year ago today our state was rocked in a bad way by Tropical Storm Irene. Towns were covered in wet silty mud. Homes were destroyed. The paths in the Mad River Path Association were trashed. Local brewers were suddenly without their brewery and our community in general was wet, muddy and very, very sad.

For Team SIPtemberfest, managing to pull off last year’s event was an accomplishment in itself when we lost our home base and all of our supplies, tokens, glasses and more to 8+ feet of water. But thanks some very good friends with strong backs, amazing stamina and ample beer supplies, the intense and daunting amount of work to be done seemed very doable and almost enjoyable!

In honor of that, we present this year’s Caption Contest Photo! The winning caption will win entry for two to Saturday (including ten tokens and a glass each,) two SIP tshirts, meal vouchers and more! You can comment on this post or on the Meg’s Events Facebook page, or you can email your entries to siptemberfest@madriver.com. You can enter as many times as you like. We will select a winner on on 9/9 at 9pm so grab some creative juice and get entering!

Good Luck & Cheers!

The SIPtemberfest Book Club is now reading Ambitious Brew – The Story of American Beer, by Maureen Ogle. Admittedly some of us are only oh, say, about one chapter in. However this is not indicative of the quality of this book and only speaks to the amount of time available to sit down and read it!

So far Ogle has painted a wonderfully vivid picture of a  burgeoning American beer culture in the mid-1800s and the concept of “German sociable drinking;” that happy place between sobriety and drunkenness that Americans were just starting to realize.

In the 1830s, whiskey was America’s poison of choice and was at it’s peak consumption rate (seven gallons annually per capita – no that’s not a typo.) But as the prohibitionists tried to crack down on “the devil’s handmaid,”  those trusty Germans and their lower ABV lager elbowed their way into our American culture and proved – for the time being at least – that drinking and violence were not  bound at the hip and that it was possible to “combine alcohol with respectability, pleasure and decency.” Which is exactly what we hope to do at SIPtemberfest!

We like to think of SIPtemberfest as kind of like being in a beer garden: leisurely enjoying quality beers while surrounded by beautiful fall foliage, local food and music, and the company of your beer-drinkin’ peers in the base area of Mad River Glen. And we have an open door policy at the SIP which means that you don’t have to have a ticket to come hang out with all of us responsible beer geeks. You can hang out with us completely for FREE! But the catch is that we expect EVERYONE to be respectful of this policy. Abuse (i.e. getting drinks for your non-SIP-ticket-holding friends,) is not only super uncool and will earn you mega-bad beer karma, but it’s illegal and you will risk getting tossed out by our eagle-eyed security guards and possibly ruining it for everyone else by forcing us to close our gates to ticket-holders only.

Since there are NO MORE TICKETS to Saturday, we want to make sure folks know they can still come up, hang out and head to the General Stark’s Pub for some bottled beer or wine. But don’t cheat the SIP. It’s very un-German and you really, really don’t want to be that guy.

There ARE STILL TICKETS to Friday night’s Meet the Brewers Dinner & Tasting, so if you are really into appreciating beer to it’s fullest, this is a wonderful chance for you to channel your inner German and be in the presence of Vermont Beer Greatness at the same time! Click here for more information about this wonderful event and don’t hesitate to get your tickets!!

And if you’re a history/beer geek like the folks here at Team SIPtemberfest, pick up a copy of Ambitious Brew and let us know what you think!

Cheers!