“Sometimes you win.  Sometimes you lose.  Sometimes it rains.”


A lot of you have been asking when Kate the Great scratch tickets will be available for purchase. We still do not have a date set!

How can that be, you ask? We are waiting for the tickets to be delivered by the printer and expect to receive them late next week or early the following week. We plan to put them on sale shortly thereafter.

Why the delay? That’s a long story – here’s the thumbnail version: we actually started this process the day after last year’s Kate Day, when I asked Brewery staff to relay feedback and provide suggestions for this year’s release. After several meetings and much lively discussion about what went well and what we could improve on, the form of 2011’s Kate release began to take shape. The suggestion of some sort of lottery evolved into the scratch ticket proposal.

Once we worked out the details internally, we went down the bureaucratic rabbit hole: our plan had to pass muster at three different state agencies, each of which had veto power, but all of which ended up being enthusiastically supportive of our idea. But, as you can imagine, this took time, as did getting just right the legal mumbo-jumbo that appears on the back of the tickets and drawing up contracts up between the various stakeholders. Then, once approved, the tickets had to be designed & laid out, printers’ proofs approved and the order placed.

And so a project I innocently believed would take a couple of months at the most actually ended up taking over five months to complete. In these circumstances, we were reluctant to set a fixed date for the start of ticket sales, knowing that we might have been forced to change it at the last minute, or worse yet, abandon the idea altogether and shift to some unknown Plan B at the last moment. But as of this moment, Plan A is still in effect. Hooray!

For those of you who were were hoping to queue up our doorstep overnight in order to be first in line to buy tickets on January 24th, precisely six weeks before Kate Day, I apologize.  Bear with us. We are committed to making this year’s Kate release the best yet.

Cheers,

Peter