indie label brewery tour

i am involved with some musicians who are planning to tour the great lakes region this spring/summer. we want to hit breweries, but since a few of the artists are homebrewers, i started thinking that we could somehow incorporate a homebrew competition at each stop. this is naive of me because ive never even attended a competition, let alone entered one, so i have no idea what im doing but was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. like maybe if something similar has been done before, if so, how was it conducted, what worked, what didnt? that sort of stuff. should i check with the breweries as i book them to see if they want to hold a contest that day? maybe i should try to find compitions and book with them. any feedback here will be awesome. thanks.

A competition takes alot of organization as all the judges are volunteers. Judging takes at least 2 judges and about 10 mins per beer. You can't really judge more than 8-10 beers in a session and still provide great feedback. I think you would have a very hard time doing this. If you could maybe setup a single competition and then 'collect' entries at each gig that should work better.

i like that idea. we have plenty of judges and time, we need stuff to do between sets to keep asses in seats so thats what we were thinking would do it, i was wondering more about things like do i need to be part of some group to run such an event? is it legal to have people bring thier beer to a brewery? things like that, but i have to think about your idea i like it alot.

You don't need to be part of any group. It's legal to drink homebrew in a brewery/bar. So long as you ask ahead of time and the brewery/bar assumes liability for you (ie if you get trashed they are liable etc....) This is how homebrew clubs can meet in bars/breweries now.