Regular price tickets were $30 per person for general admission and $45 for VIP tickets. General admission began at 7 PM and the event ended at 10 PM. VIP ticket holders were allowed in early at 6 PM.

We arrived a few minutes after 7 PM and found that there was already a lengthy serpentine line of people waiting to pick up their tickets at the Groupon, Living Social, Daily Deals and Will Call windows.

The person working the Groupon window informed us that they had run out of paper tickets. He crossed off our name on the list and just initialed our printed out Groupon. I wonder what he would have done if we had presented a smartphone with the Groupon app loaded instead of a piece of paper.

It took only about 10 to 15 minutes at the even the longest lines to reach a brewery's sampling table and get a few ounces of tasty beer. I had read that there would be food samples at the event offered by local restaurants, but we only had some warm pita bread and hummus at a Greek cafe's table.
 

Some of the breweries in attendance at the 2011 Jacksonville Craft & Import Beer Festival included Abita, Dogfish Head, Sierra Nevada, Avery, Smithwick's, Harpoon Brewery, Rogue, Terrapin, Red Stripe, Heavy Seas, Carlsberg, Oskar Blues, Chang, Stone Brewing Co, Anchor Steam Beer, Shiner, Samuel Adams, Boulder Beer, Magic Hat, Intuition Ale Works, Orange Blossom Pilsner, Palm, Blue Moon, Brooklyn Brewery, Sapporo, Hacker-Pschorr, Chimay and Bell's.

For more of my related photo galleries, click on the following links: Jacksonville Arboretum & Gardens, Fernandina Shrimp Festival, Amelia Dream Cars, Amelia Island State Park, Little Talbot Island State Park, JAX Museum of Science & History and Crazy Fish Kayaking - Jacksonville Beach.