Three days and half our tickets are sold! If you don’t have yours yet, check it off your list right now.

Good. Now that that’s taken care of, let’s talk about some of the brewers that will be at the 2012 SIPtemberfest, shall we?

We’re only going to show you a little itty-bitty sample in our first brewer sneak peak but have no fear – there’s a lot more to come! Here’s sneak peak #1:

• Vermont Beer Company – Proudly the smallest brewery in Vermont, these guys brew on a 10 gallon system and only pour exclusively at the Perfect Pear Cafe in Bradford, VT – oh, but since they’ll be at SIPtembefest you only have to schlep your way to Mad River Glen to try their delicious brews along side the rest of the brewers at the SIP!
• Switchback Brewery – These guys aren’t the winners of Seven Days Daisies Award for Best Vermont Microbrewery for no reason! The team at Switchback Brewery are no strangers to brewing a delicious, refreshing beer and they are no strangers to SIPtemberfest! We are excited to have them back again this year, serving up their tasty libations!
• Lawson’s Finest Liquids – Well of course Lawson’s is at the SIP! With gems like Double Sunshine, Chinooker’d and his award winning Maple Tripple, LFL is quite easily one most sought after and hardest to find beers in the State. He will not only be at SIPtemberfest, but he will be co-hosting our Meet the Brewer’s Dinner & Tasting on Friday, Sept 28 with Otter Creek Brewing. So if you can’t get enough of LFL, you should most certainly get your tickets to this bonus event before it sells out and enjoy four courses of incredible food paired with incredible beer. Plus you’ll get the chance to hob-nob with the man himself! There are still tickets left for this event, so get them before it’s too late!

We are all beer geeks here. Let’s be honest.

We are very likely to struggle with decisions like whether to drink a Lawson’s Double Sunshine or a Heady Topper from the Alchemist. We don’t mind drinking beer out of pretty glasses, and we only buy golf packs of cheap domestic beer if we are under serious duress, and/or are channeling our inner hipster.

And that geekiness most likely spills over into other realms of our lives. For example, here at SIPtemberfest Headquarters, our insomniacs in the graphics department dialed in their techno-geek energy and added a QR code to our coasters!

Somewhat geeky explanation of  a QR code:  Not to be confused with the Quadratic residue code, QR stands for Quick Response. It’s a type of matrix barcode used similarly to your standard UPC code with fast readability but with a much larger storage capacity. The information encoded can store virtually any kind of data, not the least of which, for example, could be the URL for the ticket sales web page for SIPtemberfest. QR Codes can be scanned easily with one of many apps for smartphones, (not all apps are created equally though!) These will then take you directly to the information encoded in the QR code.

So now you can geek out about beer at Three Penny Taproom in Montpelier, Mad Taco in Waitsfield or Montpelier, or Hostel Tevere in Warren, and with the aid of your smartphone and a coaster,  buy your tickets to SIPtemberfest before ordering your next round! Cheers!

Day one of ticket sales and tickets are disappearing like cold beers on a hot day after a long hard stressful day of work. As of this post we’ve sold just shy of a third of our tickets so the good news is: We still have tickets to both events, so if you haven’t got your tickets already, we aren’t sold out yet! The bad news is: if you wait too much longer, you might just find yourself on the wrong side of “I told you so…”

For the creatively competitive beer geeks in the crowd, we offer THREE ways you can WIN tickets! Two contests for SIPtemberfest Proper (entry for two, two t-shirts and more!) which will take some creative muscle flexing, and one super-duper easy contest for our Meet the Brewers Dinner & Tasting (entry for two) that just requires a little click here, click there.

Check out your options and good luck:

• Caption Contest – Late August. This contest will require a little creative prowess on your part. At the end of the month, we will post a photo and you can provide as many awesome captions for it as you can think of. The best caption will win a SIPVIP package for two!
• SIPphoto Contest – Starting now until sometime in September. This contest might require a little more creative muscle power, but you know you have it in you! Just photograph your leftover tokens, old SIP t-shirts, old SIP glasses or some of our SIP coasters that you snagged from your local bar. Think outside the box and have fun with this one! Submit your photos of SIP swag as early as now by emailing them to siptemberfest@madriver.com. We will announce when the deadline will be (a couple weeks or so…) and then we will post an album on Meg’s Events Facebook page. The photo with the most likes wins a SIPVIP package for two (so call on your friends to help you out!)
• Last but not least, the easy contest: We are giving away two tickets to our Meet the Brewers Dinner to one lucky winner who RSVPs Yes or Maybe to our SIPtemberfest Facebook Invite! This winner will be announced by the end of August so while this one isn’t hard, it won’t last forever so get on it!