So far, we have bloggers from Italy and the Netherlands who will be bringing along some of their favorite local beers. From Italy, Extraomnes, Brewfist and Birra del Borgo will come along with Italian blogger Alessio Leone. Dutch beers that will be accompanied by Hayo Flink will be De Prael, Emelisse and De Molen.  And finally, from Switzerland we are excited to once again have Bad Attitude along for the fun.

The world of beer blogging is continually growing and what better setting than at the Beer Bloggers Conference to introduce bloggers to a wide array of beers that may not be available to them in their own country. You can bet that the Night of International Beers is one event that will get a lot of attention.

If you have a small brewery that you would like to be represented at the Night of International Beers at the European Beer Bloggers Conference this May, please email info @ beerbloggersconference.org for more information. We encourage both citizen bloggers and breweries to get involved.

From the American Homebrewers Association to Chicago Beer Society, Randy stays active in the community as a leader and respected source of a wealth of information regarding the industry for anyone interested in the craft, from novice to skilled professional. He has a great interest in the rich history of brewing and is even an avid collector of brewing memorabilia.

Join us in welcoming Randy to our conference schedule! His expertise as a beer writer and passion as a beer aficionado is sure to inspire your blogging.  We will be announcing a second keynote speaker soon, so make sure to keep up with us here, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

Next, we want to know what you want to see on the agenda at BBC12.  Please take a moment to complete our survey and share your opinion on various potential topics for the conference:

Beer Bloggers Conference 2012: Conference Content Survey

We have already been working with our North American and European blogger advisory boards on the conference agendas and potential content. Now we’d like to ask for your input.

European Beer Bloggers Conference

Please see the Agenda page for the EBBC where we have outlined the various content sessions. In 2012, in response to discussions we had at the end of the London conference in May, we are focusing more on hard content areas in which you can take home knowledge to improve your beer blog. These content areas will focus on Writing, Technology, Industry, and Tasting.

Now, we would like to solicit your input for potential speakers, either to sit on panels for these sessions or to serve as a keynote speaker. This is your chance to think big and come up with names of people you’d like to hear speak at the conference. To contribute, simply leave a comment on this blog post or email info@beerbloggersconference.org with your specific suggestions as to whom you’d like to have speak, whether you have contact information for him/her, and what topic / keynote you think the person could cover. Please make sure to mention this is for the Leeds conference.

North American Beer Bloggers Conference

In North America, we went about this the other way around. We started with our advisory board by coming up with a list of over a dozen names for potential keynote speakers. We are in the process of confirming our two keynote speakers and will announce them later this month.

Now, we’d like to hear from you about what topics you’d like to see presented at the 2012 conference. We are open to all suggestions: general topic categories (working with breweries), specific sessions (how to use Wordpress better), or specific speakers (this is your chance to volunteer or suggest someone). To contribute, please leave a comment on this post or email info@beerbloggersconference.org with your specific suggestions, making sure to tell us this is for the Indy conference.

Thanks for your suggestions and we’ll continue to update you on the conference agendas. And thanks to our advisory boards!

European BBC Advisory Board

Mark Dredge – UK
Hayo Fink – Netherlands
Leight Linley – UK
Alessio Leone – Italy
Andy Mogg – UK

North American BBC Advisory Board

Angelo De Ieso
Ashley Routson
David Jensen
Gerard Walen
Tamre Mullins

Magic Rock Brewing Co. is a project created by brothers Richard and Jonny Burhouse, aided by head brewer Stuart Ross. The three were inspired to start the brewery by their love of great beer and the burgeoning U.S craft beer scene in particular. The brewery is new, with brewing having commenced mid 2011.

And Magic Rock is the perfect venue for our visit, not just because of their excellent beers but also because of their social media involvement. As Richard Burhouse says on their blog, “Social media and the online beer blogging community has played a significant role in supporting our brewery from its inception and has been instrumental in helping us reach an audience of like minded drinkers and publicans. We were therefore delighted when we were approached to be part of the 2012 European Beer Bloggers Conference.”

EBBC attendees signed up to participate in the Sunday event will meet at the Huddersfield train station at 10:00 AM, a 30-minute ride from Leeds. The Magic Rock folks will shuttle us from there to the brewery for a tour, tasting, and BBQ lunch. In addition, says Burhouse, “We are hoping to encourage a few other friendly brewers to join us and are also planning to have a very special limited release beer ready for a first tasting.”

The event will end at 2:00 PM with a ride back to the Huddersfield station or to The Grove Inn in Huddersfield, which local blogger Leigh Linley calls “the best pub in Yorkshire”.

The Sunday visit to Magic Rock is limited to 50 people. You must be registered for the European Beer Bloggers Conference to attend and can reserve your spot for the Magic Rock visit when you register.

We are equally excited to announce MolsonCoors is again a major sponsor of the conference and has agreed to offset the costs of beer bloggers by providing a £100 scholarship for the first 100 Citizen Beer Bloggers or Writers who register, to offset the registration fee. All you have to do to receive a scholarship refund is a) show up at the conference and b) plan to write at least one blog post or article about the conference. Citizen beer bloggers worldwide are eligible for the scholarship.

Kristy McCready of MolsonCoors UK, well known by many British beer bloggers, told us “”At Molson Coors (UK& Ireland) we recognise most ‘citizen beer bloggers’ write about beer because it is their passion and not to make money. As Britain’s biggest brewer we want to support bloggers in what they do by establishing this scholarship fund for the 2012 European Beer Bloggers Conference so that more great writing about beer is out there.”

At the end of last summer’s London conference, we surveyed attendees and the overwhelming response was to again have the conference in the UK. Granted, most attendees were from the UK but, for a second year at least, we agreed the conference should remain where the largest concentration of active European beer bloggers live.

And when we surveyed a group of UK bloggers, they pointed to Leeds as one of the best beer cities in which to hold the conference. We will celebrate this beer culture with an optional Thursday evening Pub Crawl led by local blogger Leigh Linley from The Good Stuff and other Leeds beer bloggers. In addition, we will have an optional Sunday excursion to nearby Magic Rock Brewing.

In between, we’ll have plenty of great content, speakers, beers, and meals. We will be working with our advisory blogger team in the coming weeks to set the agenda and speakers but please notify us if you have suggestions. We have reserved a block of rooms at the excellent, four-star Metropolitan Hotel at a great rate of £69 single or £79 double.

In 2011, 74% of attendees at the European Beer Bloggers Conference in London rated the experience “outstanding” (5 out of 5). We hope to replicate that in 2012 in Leeds and, with the generosity of MolsonCoors, you don’t have much reason not to attend!

Indianapolis submitted an excellent bid to host the location and was the winner of the vote by beer bloggers who selected among the four possible locations. All four locations (Austin, Asheville, St. Louis, and Indy) would have made great hosts but we believe Indianapolis won out for its central location, the support of some vocal local bloggers, and the good timing of a July conference.

Indianapolis now has over 40 breweries in the state and this is growing quickly within another dozen or so expected to open within the next year. Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis was the recipient of eight medals at the 2011 Great American Beer Festival. Not only did Sun King lead the field in total medal count, its four Gold Medals were the most won by any single brewery.We have the support of the Brewers Guild of Indiana, which is hosting one of our conference dinners, and World Class Beer, a two-time conference sponsor that has arranged for dinner and a tour in its million-case-strong Monarch Beverage warehouse.

If you choose to join the pre-conference excursion in Chicago, you can fly into that city on Thursday, July 12th, in time for dinner at the Goose Island brewpub. After dinner, we’ll have a blogger-led brewpub tour in Chicago. Not only is Goose Island providing dinner, they are stepping up to provide bus transport back to Indy the next day. We will arrange another Chicago-area brewery visit on Friday morning before we depart for Indianapolis.

The conference content is not yet set. We will reach out to the beer blogging community in the coming months for suggestions about content and speakers. We are working on details of the European Beer Bloggers Conference as well and hope to announce it within a week.

Sorry for the delay on both conferences – it takes a long time to solicit location bids, gather the opinions of beer bloggers, and then work out the details of the conference. In the end, we think it is time well spent. If you have never attended a Beer Bloggers Conference, make 2012 the date you join us.

• Asheville, North Carolina
• Austin, Texas
• Indianapolis, Indiana
• St. Louis, Missouri

The four bids were put to a vote of Citizen Beer Bloggers in North America and the top vote getter will be approached to finalize details. We hope to announce the locations of both the North American and European conferences soon.

As organizers, we put the 2012 conference out to bid because it is much, much easier to deal with a city that wishes to host the conference rather than approaching a city that might or might not be interested. Each city has to have at least one volunteer willing to put together a bid which, at minimum, needs to include two hosted dinners for the conference.

This is the first year we have taken this approach and we fully expect other cities to step up in future years. If your city is not on the list above and you think it would make a great host, let us know by commenting on this blog post. We’ll be in touch with you next year when the process begins again for 2013, possibly for both the North American and European conference locations.

We are happy to say that we have already received interest from four cities willing to host the 2012 BBC and to formalize the process, we are setting this proposal system in place. After proposals are received, we will evaluate each, follow up with potential sponsors and hotels, and put to a vote of BBC attendees the potential locations. The conference location will be decided shortly after that.

To submit a proposal, please email Allan Wright (allan at beer bloggers conference dot org) with the following information:

1. Who are the supporting organizations behind the bid and what roles do they play?

2. Do you have two breweries, organizations, or companies willing to host approximately 120 attendees for a dinner? Because the conference cost to bloggers is so low ($95), the conference only works if we have the two official dinners donated. If the dinners are not at the host hotel, transportation must be included.

3. Can you recommend and have you spoken with a potential host hotel or other conference venue? This location must be willing to host the conference at no charge, provide a reasonable rate to bloggers, and allow sponsors to bring in and pour beer (which means it must be legal per state law as well). If the venue is not a hotel, is there a good hotel close by?

4. Is there any other information we should know including potential sponsors in the area, ideas for a pre-conference Thursday night event, preferred dates, etc? The more information you can provide with advance legwork done, the better.

We hope this helps us find a great 2012 BBC location. Proposals not accepted will be considered for future years. In addition, we are working hard to finalize the location of the 2012 European Beer Bloggers Conference and hope to announce it soon.

We started with eight presentations by eight bloggers, each given 10 minutes to talk about a topic of his or her choice. Topics ranged from how to get a scholarship to the next BBC to using voice recognition software to help your blogging. Pretty cool range of stuff.

As the organizer, I was most impressed that these eight bloggers had not only committed to talking but had each clearly put a lot of time into forming their presentation, creating slides, and delivering a professional 10-minute summary.

We then heard from Jay Wilson, blogger at Brewvana, who told us about his amazing journey through his project Diary of a Part-Time Monk. You should read about the project yourself – living only on beer for 46 days – but from our perspective, we invited Jay because he did a couple of things:

1. Came up with a great idea.

2. Executed it.

3. Gained exposure for himself and for beer blogging in general.

The very first piece of PR Jay received was in the Des Moines Register and was titled “Beer Blogger Tests Monk Tale”. We love that “beer blogger” was front and center.

By noon, the conference was over and folks were discussing where we should meet in 2012.

Ultimately, though, it is a bit of a crapshoot. The panels we create have often never before been offered – anywhere – and so we have no way to know if they will work or not.

This year, we purposefully steered away from hard blogging topics (monetization, writing, search engine optimization) because a) we covered them last year and b) they didn’t seem to be what our beer blogger attendees wanted to hear. Instead, we focused on topics related to the beer and beer blogging industry. Luckily, this seemed to work great. Here were our panels for the day:

• Learning from Industry Beer Bloggers
• Working With Your Local Brewery
• Panel: Lessons from Portland as a Beer (and Beer Blogging) City
• Blogging About (and Changing) Beer Laws
• The Beer Steward Program from the Master Brewers Assoc. of the Americas

That is a lot of content – with little beer drinking – and my feeling was this really worked great. People were attentive, discussions were interesting, and every panel could have kept going another 15-30 minutes with no lag in the attention of the audience. Hats off to the bloggers and industry folks who prepared in advance, spend part of Saturday, and contributed to the success of the day.

I realize those of you who did not attend won’t know from the list above how interesting the conversations were. And I don’t think my words will help. You’ll just have to ask someone who did attend – or sign up to join us in 2012.

All this was followed, of course, by beer tasting. We immediately went into Live Beer Blogging, where bloggers tasted eight different beers from eight different breweries in a round-robin, speed-dating format. We finished the night at BridgePort Brewery, which went all out to provide us with a private room, have their head brewer say a few words, lead brewery tours, and put out an awesome dinner spread for us. Oh, and pour as much of their beers as we wanted.

It’s a fun conference to organize.