Beer event recap: FOSSILS Breweriana Sale (Saturday, May 13).

The annual FOSSILS Breweriana Sale took place this past Saturday.

Club members Ed and Kira Tash did most of the organizational work, as they have for the past four breweriana sales, which prior to this year were held on Sunday because there wasn’t enough space in the NABC building to run a sale and conduct regular business hours at the same time.

The continuing evolution of Prost, our special events area adjacent to Rich O’s, has enabled us to transfer the breweriana event to ample floor space on Saturday in the hope of tapping into the usual daily pub traffic.

This year’s results were rather mixed, though not unpromising.

It was a good business day for the pub, and my ballyhooed close-out bottled beer “yard sale” was a boming success, but there wasn’t much sales action for the breweriana vendors.

The conclusion? We almost certainly started too early in the day (11:00 a.m.), perhaps under the lingering but errant notion that breweriana sales share a customer demographic with conventional yard sales, which start quite early in the morning during the warm months of the year and attract veritable squadrons of bargain hunters who wander off to other pursuits following lunch.

We need to research the breweriana buff demographic a bit more closely, but our current hunch is that a later start (circa 2:00 p.m.) might better attract the attention of the larger afternoon and early evening pub trade.

A final thought: While many of us know what breweriana is – antique bottles, signs, mirrors, glassware, trays, clocks, lamps, and books with a beer theme – perhaps future toutings of the sale should provide alternative descriptions like “beer souvenirs” or “beer collectibles.”

Go to the NABA web site (among others) for more details, and look for the FOSSILS Breweriana Sale again in 2007. We intend to keep tweaking until we get it right.