Highlights From The 2018 Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference

American Craft Beer made the trek to New England last week to join more than 300 industry professionals at the 2018 Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference in beautiful Burlington, Vermont. We’d heard some great things about their debut event held in Asheville, NC in 2017 and we were blown away by this smart and successful outing.

And here’s why…

Just as America’s wine regions have become huge travel draws, craft beer and craft breweries have increasingly become their own travel destinations. This evolution has spawned a whole new entertainment hybrid with its own economic base…something that’s become known as craft beer tourism.

And the Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference (BMTC) is the only industry event that we’ve attended that pays special attention to marketing beer and the travel experience…both important cornerstones in today’s craft beer tourism industry.

The BMTC is put on by Zephyr United a youthful collection of travel professionals who’ve been running tours around the world for decades. Zephyr gradually began adding beer, wine and food-specific outings to their growing tour roster, and eleven years ago they branched into organizing tourism conferences like last week’s gathering in Vermont.

This year’s BMTC drew an impressive array of professionals from different segments of the beer marketing and tourism industry to Burlington’s Doubletree by Hilton hotel and conference center for three days of strategic seminars, amazingly diverse panels, and late-night fun.

Nuts and bolts subjects like social media, digital marketing, tap room management, brewery sales and the realities of the tourism industry today were addressed. But so were issues like “How Beer Tourism Revitalizes Downtowns” and “Legal Cannabis as a Brand Innovation Game Changer.”

On Wednesday the Brewers Association’s Julia Herz kicked things off with an energetic dissection of the current state of the beer industry.

And everyone seemed to agree that the Keynote Address by Ommegang’s Doug Campbell brilliantly set the tone for the many panels and breakout sessions that followed.

This year’s BMTC gave tour operators like City Brew Tours’ Chad Brodsky the opportunity to network with brewery marketing experts like Rogue’s Anna Abatzoglou and media icons like Beer Advocate Founder Jason Alström.

And Steve Kurowski from the Colorado Brewers Guild was ‘in the house’, as was Paul Leone from the New York State Brewers Association, to advocate on behalf of beer guilds, and their role in the whole beer tourism mix…

Karen and Sean Lawson from Vermont’s impressive Lawson’s Finest Liquids were among the many New England breweries on hand to share their experiences. But actually the BMTC attracted professionals from all over the country…this conference was far from just a New England thing.

Wendy Knight, the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Tourism & Marketing took to the stage Wednesday morning to represent the Destination Management Organization’s (DMOs) role in crafting beer tourism’s future and oversee a thoughtful panel of hospitality, brewery and tour experts.

And on Thursday Vermont’s Governor Phil Scott came by to welcome BMTC attendees and he was so enthusiastic and accessible. Turns out he was a race car driver in a previous life and he does know craft beer.

Each day’s luncheons were almost their own mini-beer festivals, featuring regional releases and rarities served up by some of New England’s biggest brewing names…

And it wasn’t just industry talk, (although the networking opportunities were endless)…the nights got dangerously celebratory.

Every evening special craft beer dinners and brewery sponsored events were happening all over the city….the only problem was making time for all of them.

We ended up hitting as many of the nightly events as we could and eventually made our way back to the wonderful Hotel Vermont, seriously buzzed on Burlington and a well-orchestrated and perfectly scaled Beer & Tourism conference that never forgot to be fun.