The Misconceptions and Misinformation Surrounding Limited Release Craft Beers

This just makes me think that I'm near ancient in this craft market for being into craft beer for *gasp* eight years!

 

1) So the beer wasnt great, nor worth the price of a bottle...but they should have made more? Got it

2) I think Founders knows what they are doing at this point. The perceived scarcity isn't Founders problem. They continue to up production of KBS (right?) year after year, and spread it across the country. Who cares if some people dont get any? Do you really think if they simply doubled what they sent to accts, and just did half the country one year, and half the country the next, it would make things any better? It would likely make things worse!

 

Excellent read.

Bottom line...for myself anyway, I feel I'm at the point that there is just so much excellent beers available in seasonal rotations or special releases combined with alot of comparable excellent flagship beers throughout the year making it really, really hard to make it worth my while to support just 1 or a small amount of flagship brews in any respecatble quantity. Reading this article, if flagship beers pay the bills while special releases are for marketing/good image, and if my buying habits are truley the norm, I don't know how the craft industry can sustain. If everyone is now buying tiny quantities from lots and lots of brewers.

 

Thanks for the additional information.

I'm inclined personally to believe Terrapin since exactly what I would do in their shoes is to float a trial balloon and see if anyone buys into it, then feed that information/feedback into creatng production schedules for the coming year that optimize equipment use and insure adequate production of flagships while still leaving some room for relatively low cost introductions of new things to do a bit of consumer testing.

As for Founders, contracts involve two parties. If your business model and mine are not the same we either don't do business or we reach a compromise. And if I'm the new kid on the block trying to break into the market I'm probably going to have move more towards your model to get into the market at all. The distributors I've talked to here don't seem to want such a rotating business model in place because they want such things as KBS (and other limited release beers) to serve as "rewards" for the retalers who sell the most of their products whether Founders or otherwise. Indeed, at least one of the distributors I have heard of might choose not to distribute Founders as all. And since he's not the only distributor in the area that’s a reasonably strong rejection of a lean years/rich years approach.

Enjoy your day!

 

Really interesting and well-written article.

The concept of hype is an interesting one. I appreciate the author's idea that hype arguments often boil down to "This was so hard to get, and it wasn't worth it!" But I also think that, though impossible to quantify or measure, surely there are some beers that have benefitted from a sort of groupthink that leads to hype. Again, it's almost a silly point to make, because you could never begin to attempt to flesh out which beers are like that. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, just as there are runs on retail products that many folks, in retrospect, may think weren't worth it (think Tickle Me Elmo), surely there are runs/hype on brews that may not be worth it. Of course, this just brings us full circle, as it ever does, to the basic economic argument of "If a person is willing to pay/track down/give their first born for a product, then economically speaking that's the price it's worth." It all feels very circular, and I'm not sure why I even wrote this paragraph...

But what I will definitely endorse is the idea that the growing craft beer community, as evidenced by increased sales/production/# of breweries/etc., is a sure sign of increased demand, which will almost certainly drive increased scarcity, as certain products, for a variety of reasons, cannot be produced to meet demand. Sometimes we're in a bind -- we say we want less bad beer, less AB-InBev and its ilk, but we don't like the fact that sometimes it's not as easy to get the beer we used to get trouble-free. Personally, I don't mind. Sure, I might like certain specialty releases more than some flagships, and sure it'd be nice to access them more easily, but the benefit of this current craft boom is that there's a TON of good beer out there that I don't have to work hard to find. I suppose whiffing on a Huna is a tradeoff I'm willing to make for such incredible access to so much good beer.

 

Good article. It's a sobering reality that there is a dearth of used barrels available due to the barrel aging craze. The moral of the story is you better enjoy those KBS's, Bourbon County's, Parabola's, etc...when you get your hands on them. I guess the guys already doing it have a good toe hold on the process. Boston Lager was in the top 100 as recently as 2010, whooooooa!

 

Good article. Thanks for sharing it. Just tried KBS (2013&2014) for the first time last night on tap and was definitely a little disappointed. Very light barrel character and strangely the 2013 had noticeably more coffee despite being a year old.

 

A big part of the problem is that the pursuit leads to the hype or charges of over-hype.

My guess is that once a rare beer is sampled (sometimes after years of searching), people either convince themselves that said beer is manna from heaven or they get bummed out because it does not taste like manna from heaven. The former group contribute to the hype around said beer while the later become the nay-sayers who cry "over-hyped."

In the last six months, I have been lucky enough to score six or seven rare beers that I've been trying to track down for (literally) years. As it stands, the only one of that group I'd bother to seek out again is BCBS. I guess that means that I am part of the group complaining about over-hyped beers.

 

In general, the cited article makes some fine points. Keep in mind that business people (like all people) usually make decisions for multiple reasons. Therefore, anyone claiming to know THE motivation behind anything is almost always missing the forest for the trees.

That said, anyone who believes that brewers do not consider shortages of premium beers to be a financial advantage is incredibly naïve. Again, I AM NOT saying this is the only factor in determining production numbers of premium beers.

All wholesalers and retailers in a given brewery's distribution footprint understand the calculus. To get the rare seasonal release from a brewery, they must move palate after palate of the basic styles produced by that brewery. In fact, they must move more than their nearby competition. That is not a conspiracy on the part of the brewer - that's smart business. However, such smart business practices are not necessarily good for us consumers.

 

I turned 21 in 2010 and have been building up my cellar since then so I've seen first hand how things have changed because I was right there just before everything went mad. On one hand I'm glad its so popular and everyone is doing well but on the other at a consumer level its becoming more and more insane have you seen what people are willing to pay for one bottle of KBS a good BA coffee stout to be sure but how could anything live up to 15 bucks a bottle and having to be first on a list and know the secret password and hand shack.

I'm lucky to have friends at various positions within the industry. If it wherent for that honestly I doubt I'd bother most of the time. Its one thing at an event because there's obviously more stuff going on but to have to go through all these hoops and people using mules and this and that to trade to people for other beer that have to deal with the same thing where they live. I wish everyone would just relax people take this shit way too seriously.

 

Five beers from Rogue on the top 100. That means that all of today's Rogue hate is to be blamed on everyone who joined BA after 2010.

 

Didn't Founders quadruple KBS output after a shitstorm at the release in 2011 or 2012? I mean, the author admits that he's filling in some blanks but there are some blatant ones in there.

You could never buy any PtE singles or cases in Philly as it's draft-only there. It has been very popular there on draft since at least 2009. And 2010 was the year that Younger kicked on the first day at the brewery, which is why it went to DONG, so he's either talking out of his ass or has it confused with 2009. Even back in 2009 most places in Philly got sixtels of Younger and if the tappings were announced, kegs rarely lasted more than an hour.

FFF makes over 20K bottles of Dark Lord that they charge people a pretty penny for. It may not make Gumballhead year-round money, but let's not pretend like they don't make a shit ton of money from DLD with the tickets and what have yous.

 

Why was TenFiddy called TenFiddy back then if it was only 9.5% abv? Makes more sense now.

 

http://aleheads.com/2010/03/29/whither-ten-fidy/

 

So, it is right up there with the story of "33" on Rolling Rock bottles.

Cheers!

P.S. I was at TJs Everyday earlier and I had a pint of Stoudts Karnival Kolsch (my first this year), I thoroughly enjoyed it!

 

Great insightful article. Thanks for sharing

 

Yeah, except it's on the side of a top-100 of all-time beer, not Rolling fucking Rock.

 

Been drinking!?!

Cheers!

 

How'd ya guess?