Age: 38One afternoon, many winters ago, Meg Schultz sat at the bar at Mad River Glen enjoying an après-ski brewski with Lawson’s Finest Liquids brewer Sean Lawson. “We should plan our own beer fest,” Schultz recalls one of them saying. The following September, the event planner — a social butterfly and beer lover who had previously focused more on private events and weddings — cooked up a homegrown little brew fest at the base area of Fayston’s cooperative, skiers-only, no-snowmaking mountain. Dubbed SIPtemberfest, the event was small, but Schultz had persuaded some of Vermont’s finest brewers to participate, and the music was great, the vibes good, the setting beautiful.
Occupation: owner, Meg’s Events
Town: Moretown
This fall will be the event’s eighth season and, in the interim years, Schultz has forayed further into festival territory — to the delight of Vermont’s craft beer scene. Hop Jam, a larger summer soirée at Bolton Valley Resort, has been a hit since 2014, and 2015 brought Betty’s Beer Fest, an intimate celebration of women in brewing. While Schultz enjoys bringing the best brewers in the Northeast together for a fun party, she says her favorite part of the job is “looking out on the crowd and seeing all these people having fun and thinking: I did that. I made this happen.”
