📍: Junior Ballroom 1

Your budget should reflect your brand’s mission, not just your monthly goals. This session will show you how to allocate your marketing spend wisely based on your brand’s stage, focusing on digital, social, trade, and direct-to-consumer marketing strategies that deliver real return on investment (ROI).

Presented by Julie Rhodes

📍: Junior Ballroom 2

The attenuation of a given yeast strain is a relative range because it can be heavily influenced by the wort fermentability or the composition of sugars extracted during the mash. We’ll overview how the brewer can manipulate wort fermentability in the mash and “set up the dinner plate” for a given yeast strain and dive into how different yeast strains can be used to consume more or less of the wort sugars and best practices to avoid attenuation problems stemming from poor yeast performance.

Presented by Lance Shaner and Laura Burns

📍: Meeting Room

Description coming soon

Presented by Cassidy Whitley, Hardy Lewis, Lisa Parker

📍: Junior Ballroom 1

Selling good beer is just the beginning--you've got to connect with current and future customers, stay abreast of trends, and provide a memorable experience that keeps people returning again and again. In this session, we'll cover the basic elements of placemaking including both income-generating and experience-differentiating activities.

Presented by Jodi Dubyoski

📍: Junior Ballroom 2

We’ll overview how the brewer can manipulate wort fermentability in the mash and “set up the dinner plate” for a given yeast strain and dive into how different yeast strains can be used to consume more or less of the wort sugars and best practices to avoid attenuation problems stemming from poor yeast performance.

Presented by Sebastian Wolfrum and Nicolai Staugaard Hansen

📍: Meeting Room

Contract Brewing. It used to be a four-letter word. It meant "someone else makes my beer; where's the credibility in that?." From hybrid in-house/contract scenarios to risk-mitigation strategies, entrusting a respected brewery, close to home, to help you achieve your goals might well be the best choice for your business - for its overhead, cost of goods, supply consistency, and long-term sustainability and profit.

Presented by Adam Charnack

📍: Junior Ballroom 1

In an industry driven by grassroots grit, passion, and what at times feels like flying by the seat of your pants, professional development often takes a backseat to production schedules and tight budgets. But staying competitive and keeping your staff inspired doesn’t require expensive conferences or high-ticket programs. This session explores how breweries of all sizes—especially small and independent operations—can embrace professional growth on a shoestring budget.

Presented by Cat Pearce and Aaron Gore

📍: Junior Ballroom 2

If you own or operate an established brewery, and want to increase profit this year, this session shows exactly how. Drawing from 15 years of financial insight across 285+ U.S. craft breweries, we’ll break down three common paths to increase profit by $100k/year or more using adapted examples from real-world scenarios: taproom revenue ratios, disciplined distribution, event expansion.

Presented by Chris Farmand

📍: Meeting Room

Steve Bradt from Hopsteiner and Ben Beraznay from John I Haas will combine their depth of experience with hops and hop products to cover the topic of how Craft Brewers can use a range of hop products beyond the basic type 90 pellet to improve flavor, aroma, stability, yields, and more. Attendees can expect information on product which may, by now seem almost traditional, such as CO2 extract for bittering, with a variety of downstream and aroma products designed for the modern brewer and the needs of today’s market.

Presented by Steve Brandt & Ben Bereznay