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We at Zephyr Conferences are super pleased to today announce the first-ever Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference, to be held March 28-30, 2017 in Asheville, North Carolina.

We won’t bore you with the long details here. You can read about us or why you should attend on this website. You can even take a look at the agenda, which is mostly complete.

Instead, we’ll just list a few key things you should know:

We know our tourism and marketing. Our sister company Zephyr Adventures has been in the tour business for 19 years; we run beer tours in Belgium, Colorado, and Montana; we operate the similar Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference; and we ran beer tourism and beer marketing intensive industry workshops in Virginia this past November.
Beer Tourism is important and growing increasingly so. It fills tap rooms, hotel beds, and restaurant seats. Did you know Google sent out 21 media alerts for “beer tourism” just within the past month?
Marketing is going to become as important in the beer industry as it is in almost every other industry. It would be nice if breweries never had to market their beer due to a booming industry but that day, if it ever existed, is now over.
The conference is a great deal. If you register by June 30, the cost is only $295 and we’ll throw in two three-hour intensive workshops, a $200 value, at no charge.
And a great place to network. The BMTC is limited to 300 attendees and is specifically designed for those of you in the beer and tourism industries who are actively involved in marketing and promotion at a managerial level.

And finally, the conference is going to be fun! Thank you to our sponsors such as the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild, the Asheville Brewers Alliance, Draft Magazine, and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company you will have plenty of local beers to taste and fun events to participate in. Come join us!

Photo courtesy of Explore Asheville, another BMTC Sponsor.

We decided on Asheville and North Carolina as the location for the first-ever Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference long before the hubbub over HB2, the “transgender bathrooms” bill, blew up.

That gave us several months to agonize over our decision – should we change the location and boycott the state or should we continue as planned?

We ultimately decided to continue as planned, holding the conference in Asheville, for two main reasons:

Neither Asheville nor the local beer industry supports HB2. In fact, we believe Asheville and the beer industry are likely shining examples of fairness and non-discrimination.
- We were heartened by this April 13th article about 36 local brewers supporting a “Don’t Be Mean” beer where profits (almost $42,000 at this date!) will support two local equality organizations.
- One day later we read the Asheville City Council called for repeal of the state law and then produces a video (below) that welcomes everyone to the city.
- Even our host hotel, the Crowne Plaze Resort, is creating “All Gender” bathrooms in response to the law.
Frankly, not announcing a conference that never existed before would not be coming to a state that is dealing with changes in our country’s culture isn’t going to have much impact anyway.

Frankly, we don’t want to disparage either side of the issue. People have deep feelings and we think listening is a lost art in our country. Plus, the issue has actually blown up further at the time of this writing, involving many more states than just North Carolina. Not having our little conference in North Carolina is more likely to punish the locals than anything.

But we do want to support our friends in Asheville, the entire beer industry, and all beer drinkers no matter their race, creed, religion, gender, gender identification, or just about anything else. As long as they like good beer.

Announcing the 2017 Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference

Diversity in the Beer Industry and Among Beer Drinkers

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