The first inaugural Oktoberfest event, which took place Oct. 22 at the Peter Lougheed Community Centre, raised approximately $15,000 for the Rimbey Hospital.
“The event went really well. We were quite impressed with the turnout. The band played excellent and the silent auction went well,” said Chairman of the Rimbey Hospital Legacy Foundation Patrick Rurka.
The money raised will go towards finishing the bed lift project at the Rimbey Hospital.
“This has been an ongoing project that’s been in the works for a number of years. It’s converting every patient room in the hospital to have an electronic track to put over top of the bed system so that patients could be moved out of the bed into a wheelchair or in the bathroom without having to have the nurses do a lot of physical lifting.”
He added that one of the biggest problems they have in Occupational Health and Safety is nurse injury from having to move patients around so much.
Collectively over the years it has been about a $400,000 project and Rurka said they are about $20,000 away from completing the project.
“With this event it should bring us very close to that final number,” he said.
With every ticket purchased, people got to see a live performance, enjoy a bratwurst and a beer sampler.
“What we did is we made it into a Central Alberta contest. We did a blind taste testing, so each brewery got to put forward one of their favourite brews and each person that went to the event got a sample of all four, and they had the opportunity to blindly place a vote for the best beer of the night, so we called it the Beer of the Year,” said Rurka.
The four breweries that came out to the event included Hawk Tail Brewery from Rimbey, Blindman Brewing from Lacombe, Siding 14 Brewing Company out of Ponoka and Snake Lake Brewing Company out of Sylvan Lake.
Hawk Tail ended up winning with their Cerveza as the most picked.
The band who performed was a combination of Blackwater Crude and Wild Rose Roulette, so they ended up performing as Wild and Crude, which was a mix of the two.
The main organizer of the event was Lindell Ryan, who also sits on the Rimbey Hospital Legacy Foundation, committee, which has done a lot in supporting the Rimbey Hospital.
