Book Your Room for Nationals!

Plans for the 2008 National Homebrew Convention, to be held here in Cincinnati, are coming along nicely. We have finally filled all of our major jobs, and are now working on filling out the many working staff positions. I am also pleased to announce that two additional clubs, The Brewers of Central Kentucky (BOCK, Lexington), and The Greater Huntington Homebrewers Association (GHHA, Huntington, WV), have joined us as co-sponsors. Both BOCK and GHHA are long-time supporters of Beer and Sweat. This means we now have eight clubs (BBL, CMI, DRAFT, SODZ, LAGERS, FOSSILS, plus BOCK and GHHA) acting as co-sponsors!

Our host hotel is already starting to fill up, and the AHA has not even started to advertise. At this year's convention in Denver, we handed out flyers for 2008 that had the booking information for the hotel on them. Based on this one promotion alone the hotel is already over half full! The AHA has now added the hotel information to their convention site (http://www.beertown.org/events/hbc/index.html), and it is possible that the primary hotel will fill up before the end of the year. (There is a secondary hotel that will be available just across the parking lot from the main hotel.) If you plan to spend any nights at the main hotel, I strongly suggest you book your room now! (No deposit is required, and the hotel's cancellation policy is very liberal.) You can find the booking information at www.starwoodmeeting.com/book/brewer . For planning purposes, the pre-conference events, including tours and pub crawl, start on Wednesday, June 18th. The main conference starts on Thursday, and the big evening events get under way with Pro Brewers Night. Friday is the meat of the Technical Sessions (including the Bourbon Barrel Beer session), and Friday night is the granddaddy of all homebrew events, Club Night. The Technical Sessions continue Saturday, with the Grand Banquet, including announcing the winners of the National Homebrew Competition, on Saturday night.

The heavy planning will get really rolling after the first of the year. We will be asking for many hands to help with tasks big and small throughout the convention. We'll probably need a total staff pushing 75 people. If you're interested in helping out, please let us know! If you're not interested, well, we're going to draft some of you anyway :-) Thanks in advance for your help in turning this into an event to remember!

Rob Westendorf