This past weekend we held the Philadelphia Invades Pittsburgh Beer Fest at Spoonwood Brewing. We want to thank all of you who attended. We heard from a lot of you and received tons of positive feedback.

This event is only successful if two things go right. The host venue has to be an ideal location and the beer being offered is well sought after. And those two items were perfect.

We could not have asked for a better location than Spoonwood Brewing. There was plenty of room to move around. The outdoor patio made for a perfect place to enjoy the sun. And their beer and food were a welcomed addition. If you’ve never been, please make the trip. We WILL be back!

If you missed it, or want to recap the day, check out the photo’s from the event:

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The second part is the beer. Since we can’t offer a large quantity of beer the quality has to be top notch. And the Philly breweries did not disappoint. From award winning beer to a handful that haven’t even been released in the Philly market yet, the Philly beer was perfect on this day. We are very thankful for 2SP, Free Will, Hidden River, Tuned Up, La Cabra, Levante and Conshohocken. And a special thank you to Stable 12 and Levante for donating to the can raffle. They didn’t have to do that and we are grateful to them.

Now onto the Cease and Desist…..

If you were at the event than you know we were unable to raffle the Tired Hands Beer. Let us be perfectly clear: this was their decision, not ours. Long story short a legal representative from their organization informed us roughly 15 minutes into the event that we were not allowed to conduct the raffle.

We were caught off guard by this decision for a few reasons. In March of this year we contacted their sales manager to work this out and inform them of our plans. At no time during that conversation did the sales manager tell us this was something we could not do. Also, we spent 2 months marketing this event on social media and tagging Tired Hands in each post involving them. Once again, during those 2 months, we never heard from them that this would be a problem. It wasn’t until the day of the event that we got a call.

In the end, while we are exceptionally disappointed by Tired Hands, what we are most upset by is that they did this to our customers after months of advertising. 200+ people bought tickets with the expectation of a Tired Hands raffle and we had to inform them on the day of the event that what they were promised was not taking place.

We’re disappointed they would do that to our paying customers after we discussed our intentions with them and they knew about this for months. As of this writing we have reached out to Tired Hands with limited response to our inquiries. We will update as we get a more detailed response.

So all we can say to our customers who did not get a chance at the beer is that we apologize that we could not completely fulfill what we told you we were going to do. With these events, we set out to showcase the PA beer community that we love. Unfortunately, not all the people in that community are as supportive. (Lucky for us 99.99% are). But we hope that this did not spoil the event for those who attended.

However, all was not doom and gloom for the raffle. We are extremely thankful to Stable 12 (Phoenixville, PA) for donating 5 cases and Levante Brewing (West Chester, PA) for donating 2 cases to the raffle. Because of these two excellent breweries the raffle was a hit!

We look forward to another invasion soon!