Membership Program Details

The U.S. Steinholding Association Membership Program was created to help showcase your great events and make them even better by attracting more Steinholders and even bigger crowds!

Member Venues receive the following benefits and services from the U.S. Steinholding Association:

1. You'll have access to high quality, up-to-date digital copies of our guide documents:
1. The U.S. Steinholding Association Competition Planning Guide: This comprehensive manual walks you through everything you need to consider when planning a competition. We've had years of experience setting up and hosting Steinholding events at festivals, breweries, bars, and other venues, so don't waste time learning it all yourself through trial and error! Whether you've hosted Steinholding before or not, this guide will help make sure your event is top-notch. The Planning Guide also includes the most recent version of our competition rules in a condensed, easy to print format so you can always have a hard copy on hand for your event.
2. The U.S. Steinholding Association Official Judging Manual: We know as well as anyone how tough it can be to make the right call in the heat of a competition. This guide makes it easy for you by giving extra background info on the rules and tips from our expert judging panel on how to enforce the rules fairly and effectively.
2. We host live video calls monthly during pre- and peak Steinholding season from July to October to demonstrate the rules, provide judging tips and answer questions, and you'll have an invitation to join them. Reading the rules is a good start, but seeing the sport in action adds a lot of context and helps make you feel more confident that you're judging correctly. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a video must be worth... even more!
3. Do you need some high quality dimpled 1 Liter glass steins? If you want some official U.S. Steinholding Association steins for prizes or to use in your competitions, you're in luck! Members receive a 20% discount off of the base price of our official U.S. Steinholding logo steins. This includes our already discounted bulk case pricing!
4. We'll add your event to our Competition Map with a special U.S. Steinholding Association Member Venue icon that makes your venue stand out from the crowd and lets Steinholders know that you're legit. Tens of thousands of Steinholders and Oktoberfest enthusiasts look at our map every year to find great events like yours. Your events will stand out with one of our exclusive Member Venue icons, showing that you take Steinholding seriously and host the highest quality events.
5. You will have a direct line to the nation's leading Steinholding/Masskrugstemmen experts and we'll do our best to answer any additional questions specific to your venue/event regarding best practices for competition setup, judging, prizes, etc.
6. We've created a customizable flyers and social media post templates and copy for advertising your Steinholding competition. You'll get Word files for creating 8.5 x 11" posters to print for your venue and high-quality square PNG image files to use for social posts.
7. We will send you a 5"x4" Members-only U.S. Steinholding Association Member front-adhesive window sticker so you can display your membership proudly. Put it in your front window and we promise it will get noticed and drive more traffic to your competitions! The sticker image is at the top of this page.
8. We give you permission to use our name and logo in your advertising and marketing media for your event. This lets people know that your event is a legitimate competition, especially to members of the Steinholding community who are looking for high quality events. We'll provide you with high resolution image files to use. NOTE: These are only to be used for advertising and marketing materials. If you want to use the logo for additional purposes such co-branded merchandising or anything else that will be sold, contact us to discuss this, as it will require a licensing agreement.
9. Need some U.S. Steinholding merch for competition prizes (or to keep for yourself)? Each Member location receives a discount coupon code to our official Threadless merch store. This allows you to purchase all apparel items at our base cost, with no mark-up. We can't even get these items cheaper than this for ourselves!

What do we ask for in return? Membership is dues-based and is good for one year. The fee we charge for membership helps us to put more resources into growing the sport and expanding our services. Membership provides a number of benefits, but it's a two-way street and if a venue wants to be a member of the Association, there are certain commitments that we expect and standards that Members must meet. If a member location isn't maintaining a high level of excellence in their competition hosting practices, everybody loses. We require that all Members abide by the following guidelines, all of which you should already be doing because they greatly benefit you anyway:

1. Host a minimum of one Steinholding competition per year. We encourage you to host as many competitions as you can, but the point is that only venues that host competitions are eligible for membership.
2. Use the U.S. Steinholding Official Rules at your competitions and share them with your competitors in advance so they know what to expect (available here: www.ussteinholding.com/info/official-steinholding-rules) and have at least one judge on hand to enforce these rules. NOTE: Use of our Official Rules includes the use of traditional 1L glass dimpled style steins.
3. Provide us with at least two weeks' notice (preferably more) of the date(s) of your competition(s) so that we can keep our membership database and Competition Map up to date. Giving us as much notice as possible whenever you're going to be hosting a competition helps us get the word out to our followers. We also recommend that you create a Facebook Event for your competition/festival event(s) and invite @US Steinholding as a co-host. This only takes about 5-10 minutes to do and it's huge for cross-promotion. We can provide instructions on how to go about it if you aren't familiar with the process.
4. Tag us (@ussteinholding) in any Steinholding-related social media posts your organization makes about your event. This allows our followers to see your posts and makes it easier for us to help cross-promote your event.
5. Post videos of your competitions on your social media accounts along with the winning times and names of your winner(s) and tag U.S. Steinholding Association so we can share with our fellow Steinholding enthusiasts. If you're running a tournament-style competition, the more videos the better. Membership requires that you post a video of the final/championship round. This is important from a promotional perspective, but we also need to be able to ensure you're enforcing the rules appropriately. Since we can't have U.S. Steinholding representatives at every event, we rely on reviewing video to provide feedback to our Members.

If you're ready to take your Steinholding competition events to the next level, or if you're ready to introduce your patrons to the sport, now is the time. Sign up today for the 2023 membership rate of just $99 per year.

When you're ready to sign up, choose "Add to Cart" below to purchase your membership and to provide us with your competition information! You'll receive your discount codes and links to electronic copies of our documents immediately via email (check your spam folder because this email always goes there), and we'll update your status on the competition map as soon as we process your venue information. If you have any questions that you would like to ask before you sign up, email the U.S. Steinholding Association Commissioner's office at jbanko@ussteinholding.com.