How many Beats for 1 Rare

No. Those are saved for you.

 

like i said, i'm not talking about the quality of the beer, nor even the value of the purchase (even in the Evil Brewery scenario where they added $30 on because they think beer geeks are stupid or something, the fact is that people who bought it loved it, so it was a good value--plus, aging a beer in barrels for 2 years really is expensive for a [relative to other small breweries] huge brewery brewing at capacity).

but i can't even get close to an explanation for "it will never be made again," besides "we're artificially limiting the supply of this beer--which by the way is amazing."

p.s. are you sure you mean 'hypocritical'(:?

 

How can you artificially limit a beer when there are only so many Pappy barrels available?

 

Yes. I really liked Rare when I had it (I want to drink another bottle soon-ish to see if the experience I've gained in the past 6 months has changed how much) but I don't really think it's going to be worth writing home about in two years.

Well, Beat is spontaneously fermented, while pretty much every other wild isn't. I think that's the main difference between the generic "american wild" and the generic "lambic". I really enjoyed Beat 3 recently, so I'm optimistic about 5. That said, B3 is only a few years old, it could drop off a cliff. I wasn't nearly as impressed with Deviation or T20 and I tried them at the same time (though, again, I think those are mostly non-spontaneous).

 

unless there are not and never will be pappy 23 barrels available, there is no reason to state conclusively that you will never make the beer again but for crass marketing.

(unless it was hellish to make, or some other explanation... but if "this product is excellent, and FOR NO REASON AT ALL I REFUSE TO EVER MAKE IT AGAIN," doesn't set off red flags in your brain, you're sort of a naive innocent at the mercy of marketing, don't you think?)

 

This might just be me, but I think there is precisely nothing special about pappy barrels.

 

it's not just you, but i'm sort of "allowing in the faulty stipulated premise to show just how weak the overall argument is."

i mean, believing that you couldn't make as good a beer with pappy 23 barrels as with pappy 20 is already teetering on a "can you discriminate between facts and marketing?" tightrope, but the point is that no explanation is offered for the refusal to make the beer again.

that's the crass part. "it's rare dummies. gotta collect all 16,000 bottles, lol" (apologies if i forgot the figure). it's one thing to lie about why you can't/won't make it again... but to just say, "this is a rare beer that [explanation omitted] won't be made again," what is that? "you guys are going to love this so much, and it will sell out so quickly and be so hard to obtain that... we won't make it again!"

 

I never said there was...just that there are a limited supply of them.

 

it's a good bourbon to a lot of aficionados. the real test is, can someone who will pay the pappy premium in beer tell the difference? i honestly doubt many tasters could differentiate between regular bcbs (say a vertical) and rare in a blind taste test.

given that, why not just age in elijah craig barrels for 2 years and get more or less the same product to the taste buds of 90+% of your market?

 

apologies for going on at length about this (in an unrelated thread) by the way. if for some reason any of you care to argue with me about it, feel free to private message (i don't mind... it seems like a very cut and dry issue to me, without any sort of dealbreaker background info that i'm missing).

edit: @ levitation, bourbon aficionados (oh shit, THAT was the name of the homebrew42 nemesis guy, aficionado!) can tell the difference between pappy 20 and pappy 23 (etc). but the difference between beer aged 2 years in pappy 23 and pappy 12...? i don't think so. maybe they can tell that they're different, but i don't buy for a second that they could correctly identify which was which.

 

That's irrelevant if they're not an important part of the recipe. The extended aging time is almost certainly the important part there.

 

What?

 

Fair enough!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there aren't exactly a surplus of pappy 23 barrels. I also don't have an explanation. I'm sure you and I could speculate, but it seems like you're jumping to the most negative conclusion. Which is fine, you may be right, afterall.

Dude, bro, I said hypercritical!

 

fully agreed. and that's why i, like you, find the promise of " omg 1 time, too limited to make again! " hilarious and unbelievable. they could make it again with different barrels, call it the same thing, and most people wouldn't know the difference.

does russian river use the same wine barrels every time? does lost abbey use the same bourbon? did all batches of bcbs, ba blackout, arctic devil, abacus, parabola, ba speedway, etc. come out of the same barrels? if not, then what makes them a " uniform " product while rare is a " unique " one? marketing. in all likelihood, many beers are just as much one-offs as rare is.

basically, i'm repeating what i said here: http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/king-henrys-whale-status.2959/page-3#post-40192

 

haha, whoops.

anyway, yeah, you're right that it's speculation (i am talking about motives after all). i just don't see any other reasonable explanations, and it seemed obvious to me. it doesn't matter though, just sort of a side conversation. i mean, i think BAs would be kind of silly to not buy a great beer because they thought the marketing was rude. other things may be boycott-worthy, but this is just sort of barstool talk kind of stuff.

 

Fun fact: the tasting group did pappy 23 and 20 side by side and most people liked the 20, more.

 

Okay, what I'm saying is that they could age some BCBS base in some other bourbon barrels for 2 years (or whatever) and call it BCBS Rare and no one could tell. Saying that Rare is limited because Pappy is limited is a cop out because the barrel brand isn't super relevant.

 

Ohh, no. I totally agree with you. haha

All I was saying is that people thought Rare was...rare...due to the fact there was limited availability of Pappy barrels and what not (and that it is considered a very good bourbon). I am totally on board with the fact that in a blind tasting the vast majority of beer drinkers would not be able to tell the difference between (all things being equal) a new batch of pappy bcbs and another higher rated bourbon barrel that was used.

Sorry if my other posts came off as confusing.

 

I guess this is just where our opinions differ, your speculation doesn't seem obvious to me. The only (poor) comparison I can draw is BCBVS: though it wasn't touted as rare (literal sense of the word) it's a one-off because, according to GI the vanilla beans were a nightmare in the barrels. Maybe pappy 23 barrels have pieces of pappy himself and GI isn't interested in fishing human gibs out of their barrels (again)

 

To get back to the original question of the thread, as someone who owns neither beer and is not trying to seek out either, I'd say that right now it would be fair for a Rare holder to ask for up to 4 b5 Beatifications. Rare deserves a bit of a premium above $4$ due to its age and one-off status, and since Beatification was available for purchase at the brewery for so long and in such generous allocations I can't imagine that it should go straight $4$ with something as difficult to track down these days as Rare.

After a bit of time, though, Beatification will be just as scarce as Rare and should trade more like 3-1.