$15 pint of pale ale

heady: alchemist brewing at capacity, sells every last can of each batch within 2 days, available in a single area where it still isn't quite sating demand, reasonable price and guaranteed freshness,

peeper: sits on shelves in several states. has a bottled on date printed on the bottle, with instructions not to drink it if it's old.

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i'm sure MBC has motivations that aren't crystal clear to us beer lovers, and i'm equally sure that their heart is in the right place (seem like cool people, make great beer, the charity thing is cool, etc). however, they've made serious mistakes. good for locals that they can get a pint on draft for what passes for a reasonable price (AKA huge bar mark up). everywhere else in the northeast MBC is shipping out cases of good beer to a distributor, who then sends it to a variety of stores who provide the service of cellaring it into mediocrity.

 

Is it a case of coming out initially at a high price point and not adjusting as the market matured? When they first hit, the $ made sense, not a ton of competition, great beer. But now, not so much.

 

i think it's exactly that. zoe as $7 500ml bottle that i don't usually see but occasionally manage to grab super fresh = worked for me. i bet what they're doing locally makes sense for them too... but the MA market (huge) and the places they're expanding into (at least what i've seen in NYC and CT) seem like glaring problems. it's one thing when a giant like stone makes an error (or the distributor does, or whoever) and a few stores get stuck with cases of ruination that they never sell... it's another with MBC who can't possibly be absorbing these losses all that well.

then again, what do i know about business? i don't run a brewery. i also never buy MBC any more either though, and it's not out of silly bias (i think they're great people) or due to the quality of the beer.

 

Your math is for a $15 12oz pour. The whole thread is about the $15 16oz pint at Mead Hall.

Also my math accounts for only 97% yield. Sorry.

 

Agreed - I was using your 12 oz pour calcs
were close on the yield which some bars dont come close too

I remember being at a bar with world wide stout and the guy pouring loads of beer and foam down the drain to give me a full 10oz. I bet he wasted 10 oz.

 

$6.50/12oz

 

When you all talk about industry standard margin, this is industry standard for Boston only, right??

 

RIP the Alchemist brewpub....Heady used to be $4 per 12 oz a short 2 years ago in that same spot.

 

RIP Alchemist brewpub for about a million reasons in addition to prices.

 

Please explain what MBC is doing that is so innovative. I'm not arguing that some of their beers are pretty good, but I haven't seen anything out of them that hasn't been done before.

 

Maine Brewing CO's pricing is way out of whack and I hope they go out of business. Their shit is ridiculous and their beer nowhere near justifies the price. Their beer ranges from sub-par to slightly above average. $15 per pint of a pale ale is the shit that keeps potential craft beer customers away. They can rot.

 

Really dude? You hope they go out of bussiness? How can thier prices make you so angry that you would wish that on them? How can you take this shit so personally? Great attitude, you're a real assett to this forum and community.

Actually, this forum sucks, i hope it goes out of bussiness. 4 pages of yet more whining about the price of MBC. Real fresh topic. Can't wait for next weeks version of this thread.

 

No, I was just really drunk last night. Although I do refuse to support them.

 

You've very quickly lost all creditability with me, and no doubt, a lot of other people on this site. That's fine, of course, and people have different tastes, but in your zeal to defend MBC (who make very good, but extremely overpriced beer, in my opinion), you've completely discounted the output of no less than 25 breweries, several of whom have won several medals at GABF, who are brewing world-class beers, both true-to-style and innovative.

You can defend MBC and buy their beer (I do from time to time, when I know it's fresh and feel like splurging), but $6 (at the cheapest I've seen it) for less than 17oz of a very good, but straightforward pale ale, is absurdly expensive. There are plenty of other local options of similar quality that are significantly cheaper. For my money, Zoe is the MBC beer I buy most frequently, because it's actually more unusual style-wise and there aren't many comparable beers for less money. I love the beer MBC is brewing, but with other similar-sized breweries making similar beer (in terms of style and quality) for significantly less money, their prices are extremely difficult to justify in the long-term. I hope their new brewery will mean lower prices and an end to threads like these, but we'll see.

Now, to suggest that breweries like the CBC, Portsmouth Brewery and Smuttynose, just to mention a few GABF gold medal-winners you've bashed, are not brewing excellent beer is delusional, as someone else said. You may not like their beer, and that's fine, but to dismiss as "depressing" is hyperbolic at the least.

 

Spot on - that's why I drink he hell out of Flying Jenny Pale Ale - one of the best APA's out there in my opinion and only $8.99 for a six-pack of cans. Only negative is that it doesn't get outside of RI.

 

its only beer.