KBS sightings in CT!!!

I'll take a lil' heat off ya and thank you and mansfield for picking me up 1 of those luscious 4pks.

Saturday night bonfire/KBS it is!!

Cheers Bro.

 

The problem with releases like this is you go to your normal store (in my case M&R) were I spend far to much money all year and I feel like I have to beg for a bottle or 2.

Stopped in some small store during lunch that I have never been to before and walk out with a case.

Doesn't make sense.

 

Makes sense to me...you have your usual haunts that you rely on for most of your beer purchases as I'm sure most others do and oftentimes these are the same landmark locations that these same people typically rely on as well.

Hitting the smaller stores that are a bit more "in the cut" is a smart move as those lower profile locations likely don't receive the type of attention that would make that particular place a go-to for voracious craft beer lovers.

I would have never thought to hit Stew Leonard's Wines for my 4pk if it weren't for the fact that the more "popular" local stores were either working with lists (World Of Bev), hadn't received their shipments yet (Ninety9) or were limiting the amount sold per person due to the volume of inquiries that they had been receiving prior to the delivery (Total Wine).

Over time, I think this strategy will eventually catch up with itself. Nothing good lasts forever.

Congrats on the solid haul.

 

I'm glad others have been having luck; so far my attempts have met with nothing but frustration - and I wasn't even hoping to get more than a bottle or two. A couple stores told me they'd be getting some tomorrow, but since my local store told me they'd be getting it today and had already sold out with a 1-bottle limit by the time I got there at noon, I'm not holding my breath.

I did hear that Prime got a keg, so hopefully I'll just be able to drink a few glasses whenever that gets tapped; not a fan of aged KBS anyway.

Cheers!

 

Atleast 1 or 2 places in Glastonbury have it on tap now

 

Got a 4 pack at M&R in Glastonbury but they sold out quickly. Had it on draft at Plan B in Glastonbury this evening. Amazing!!

 

I ended up with 2 lonely bottles here in New Haven. Oh, well, way better than nothing. Hope I'll catch it if Prime puts some on tap.

 

For those still looking... Loading Dock in Milford just posted on facebook that they have it in. 2 bottle limit, $5.99 each.

 

I never thought I'd see the day where Loading Dock made Ancona's look bad...

Sidenote: Appears Ancona's finally sold out last night...

 

Their reasoning for their price point:

"trust me, it's a difficult decision when pricing rare, hard to get beer. In this particular instance we called around to other stores in Fairfield county that received this beer (not many stores got the beer). We were given pricing from $24 for a four pack to $15 for a single bottle. We settled on $9.99 which is somewhere in the middle. In this case demand supported the price that we set. This is far from our traditional method of pricing."

I checked and it turns out that it's actually not a difficult decision when pricing rare/hard to get beer.The whole call-a-bunch-of-stores-to-determine-an-average seems rather disingenuous. Why not mark it accordingly with your other beers (which we've agreed was already in-line with the area)?

It's not hard for them to get. It's hard to us to get.

 

Picking "somewhere in the middle" doesn't make sense when most stores are in the $5-$6 range per bottle, with an outlier at $15. Pricing it at $9.99 still makes them an outlier. But, maybe that price allowed some people to get it who otherwise would have missed out if we all flocked there at $6/bottle.

 

Yeah, sucked to see Mitch post that, as i actually think he's a good guy, and I like him as a person. It is what it is though. Let's hope it's just a blip on the radar and not something they do regularly with "rare" beer moving forward...

 

I agree with that. I'm sure that anyone who hasn't had the access/opportunity to buy KBS before would jump at the chance of grabbing a bottle for $9.99. Nothing wrong with paying whatever price that you may think is reasonable.

However, they're also alienating their regular customers, such as myself, by creating a precedence with this type of pricing practice. I would say that I'm curious as to how they'll be pricing the next rare/hard-to-get beer that they receive, but I've officially crossed them off my list.

 

I agree with all of this, but haven't officially gona as far as the bolded portion yet, although its garnered my attention.

 

The case cost $90 from the distributor. Even at $5.99 per bottle, they're still making a hefty profit. $9.99 is just ridiculous

 

I work at a store so maybe my opinion can help a little bit on subject. It is indeed extremely hard to price these types of beers. They come out once a year and where I work we get an extremely small amount, if any at all. This year our salesperson was allotted 3 cases total for all of his accounts. They had to split up cases and give stores individual six packs and bottles. It's a complete disaster.

In my opinion you cannot price these with the same profit margin as a "regular" craft beer. You also can't price gouge like I see a lot of these stores doing because that's just ridiculous. Can you charge a small percentage more? I believe that's more than reasonable.

Many stores are putting a cap on how many bottles you can buy per person but I see people finding stores that don't care and they walk in and buy a CASE. This is just as bad as price gouging IMO. We want to allow as many people that we can the opportunity to try this amazing beer and the people that go in a buy cases of it are causing just as much of a problem as the stores charging too much for it. Either way, people are still not getting any.

Hope that helps

~Z

 

Totally agree, I would have accepted a reasonable justification for $10 a bottle but that response just reinforces that I should probably avoid Ancona's from now on. Using a standard margin has worked for all their other beers in the past, including other limited releases, so why is this one any different? They took advantage of getting a beer that was hard to get for consumers and more then doubled their margins because they could find 24 people who would pay that price. It does seem disingenuous to say "We were given pricing from $24/4 pack to $15/bottle" when they probably talked to one place that was $15/bottle (wonder who that was by the way.) If I didn't know better and read their response on facebook I'd probably think they were somewhere in the middle on pricing when in reality they're one of 2 or 3 outliers. I talked to more than 6 places in the area including Ancona's and they were the only one over $6/bottle.

But like I said, good for them for squeezing another $100 out of their case of KBS from the .rar beer hunters. I hope they get a lot of super limited releases in the future because they'll need them to get those people back in their store to make up for the loss of business. I won't feel bad about buying my Sea Hag at Total Wine for $1.50 less a six pack or my Gandhi at Ninety9.

 

I agree that a limited release like this may merit slightly higher margins because of the hassle associated with it, if they wanted to charge $7 bottle, which is an almost 50% larger margin than those charging $6 if the $90 a case cost is correct, because someone had to deal with phone calls all day then fine I wouldn't be upset about that. But this release wasn't crazy, it's not like they had to have extra employees working and deal with a huge line of people waiting to get it, they get the case, put it behind the register and answer a phone call once in a while. People come in throughout the day, it sells itself and it's gone in a few days at the most. Charging $10 a bottle, which equates to a margin of more than 2.5 times other stores in the area, and then saying well another store is charging more when someone inquires about the price strikes me as being similar to a mom asking her child if he broke a lamp in the house and the child responding yes but his brother took the car for a joyride and crashed it so he shouldn't get in trouble.