If everything goes as planned, homebrewers in New Zealand can look forward to their first ever national homebrew conference next year. Homebrewers Karl Summerfield, Mike Stringer, and Eduard Briem are planning the event for March 18–20 in Nelson, to coincide with Marchfest (a craft beer event). Confirmed speakers at the conference include Dr. Chris White (White Labs), Mike “Tasty” McDole (The Brewing Network), and several local craft brewers. The current lineup of events can be found at the website for the conference.

In order to be able to hold the festival, however, they need to sell 100 tickets before the event. To do this, they are selling tickets on the crowdsourcing site, Pledge Me. At the time this was posted, they were over 80% of the way to their goal and have 26 more days to reach it. If they reach their goal, they may be able to bring additional speakers to New Zealand, speakers such as . . . oh, I don’t know, maybe there are two guys — one that does a podcast and one that does a website — that would love to attend. Who knows? It could anyone, really.