Westbrook Mexican Cake

Yeah and I was agreeing, mostly.

Breweries, distilleries, McDonalds, Hookers, Car salesmen all hype their product.

Marketing is a thing because it works.

The fact people seemingly have a hard time grasping that beer is a business and that your (not you personally) personal whims about which beer they should be making and releasing and how much during your planned vacation or your Mule's grandmother's picnic in Charleston or sending more allocation to your favorite local bottle shop than to someone else favorite local bottle shop don't always jibe with how they've decided to run their business. They don't (typically) just start picking distribution locations out of a hat and then roll a couple dice for the numbers. There's (again usually) a good business reason for it and not all of that reason may be how many bottles sold today and how much present day dollars they can extract.

The fact that beer traders, beer nerds and just greedy fucks (all of which I can be included at one point or another) self hype the ever living fuck out of some releases should share a huge, if not most, part of the blame.

There's a shit load of beers out in the great wild and Whale hunting so that you can be the cool brah (check out my Untappd this week dude!) causes this fucking whiny bullshit all the time. No brewery owes you shit. You chose to drink their beers. If their biz practices "disgust you" there's a really good way to solve that problem.

Stop drinking their beer.

/rant

And this thread needs a fucking cleansing.

Disclaimer: I drink a lot of beer, use untappd, buy "special releases", show up at said special releases and spend an assfuck load of cash on rare whiskey and rare beer. So i get it. I just also get how fucking lame this culture has gotten because it's always about chasing the Whalez brah! and often forgetting to enjoy the actual beer.

flame on.

 

Dah-yum. I like you, @porknwhiskey. You can stay.

 

My whale has the same label but different color wax! Eek!

 

Just called TW in West Ashley, sold out this afternoon.

 

Big respect for this. I get more than a little annoyed when bottle shop staff suck up 75% of the allocation for a rare beer.

 

Swig & Swine in West Ash has MC on tap. But I'm not sure if they're advertising it on Facebook, Twitter or Youporn.

 

I'm not a local but my companies headquarter's is.
I will be in the area in middle of June, will they still be bottling MC and distributing it locally by then?
Want to know if I should still try and hunt some down or if there will be no chance.

 

local distro already came thru Tuesday, they bottled more but not sure if that will stay local or not. heard they have to send a bunch to GA. you might find a smaller store with some bottles still in mid-June, seems like a stretch this year tho.

 

This. A million times this.

 

I think the only way to end this "nightmare"/thread is for all the locals to stop posting stuff here. Also, I'd like to thank whoever reported me twice for "trolling". Cracks me up, because the real trolls on here are free to roam and they don't get in trouble. I didn't even say anything that was bad enough to be reported over. Cheers!

 

WB did mention on their FB page a week ago after selling out at the brewery that they would be bottling more. No word on the details. I'm sure the locals, like myself, are well stocked, with some likely to work out an IP trade with you. Good luck!

 

Too funny.. I wasn't the one to report obviously, but it's funny you have the audacity to complain about it.

 

I had to purchase mine as a 2 bottle allocation, at regular retail (of course) from one of my retailers. I don't get any special consideration even though I have been selling Westbrook since the day they launched. I also don't think I deserve special consideration either. I will probably never taste BA Mexican cake.

I don't know of any of my retailers who would hoard that much for themselves. Maybe a bottle or two, yes, but not 75%.

Anyway, it was really really hard to allocate out beer this year to my accounts and really stressful. It was a completely different animal last year and the year before. I'll be happy on Tuesday when I can say it's all shipped.

 

There ya go folks, a look at the stress that a distributor has to deal with. Let alone the brewery that has to take the flack, the distributor also gets their share, and as @RDMII confessed, even the stores are linked to the devil for not supplying your every need.

Pretty bad when as a distributor you know you'll end up pissing off some of your accounts, with no ill intent because of the backlash they get from customers upset they didn't get more!

 

I picked up a four pack of Yeti today. Damn, it's going to be tasty.

What does that have to do with this conversation? Probably nothing, except for this: When Mexican Cake shows up in Atlanta sometime next week, I will try to obtain some. I may be one of the lucky few who gets a bottle, or I may not. If I don't get any, well, I'll still have my Yeti to drink. Right?

 

What's funny is people bitch about announcing it on social media but now how mad are you gonna be that more was for sale at the brewery today, they just didn't announce it. Now that they didn't hype it are you going to say WB is bad for not saying anything?

 

::head asplode::

 

perks of working for a bottle shop making 10 bucks an hour?

 

If the beer is still around on the third day, we can get a single bottle. That has never happened.

Another thing to note here, distributors catch a TON of flack too. In March there were four limited beers that all landed in the same week, KBS, Black Note, Siberian Black Magic Panther, and BA Skoons. We did it our usual way of just posting it all up and sold every bit of it in under an hour. Then we hear from the buyer who works at the distributor asking us to never post pics of limited beers again as he's been fielding calls all day from other stores bitching that they didn't get any to sell. The stores bitching of course are all new, small, or don't order very much regular inventory to get on the allocated list. Still they all cried 'unfair' just like their would be customers would have done had they got it and ran out. So the entitlement extends past just the hoarder guys hunting whales, it even goes to the retailers who, before seeing the pics of these beers, didn't even know they existed, but now they're being shut out from getting them and it's bullshit to them. 99% of rare beer allocations are based on previous sales, if you don't move a few cases of Founders beers a month, why should you get 10 cases of KBS? Black Ops goes to the top accounts only, so unless you're selling Brooklyn Lager and Pilsner to everyone coming in the door, you don't get it. Still these retailers will cry just as much as the beer trolls about things being unfair even though they know the rules.

 

We saw what happened in Georgia when a importer/distributor decided to favor a single retail chain to the detriment of the leading specialty beer stores, such as yours, regarding the release of a certain beer. Now I'm not going to lie and say I don't miss having this group around because we lost a lot of great beer in the process. But I understand why they had to go. Maybe one day things will be better, but in the meantime, things must be the way they are.

Not sure if that's relevant to this conversation or not, but I guess it's true that things go off the tracks when there are misunderstandings between distributors and retailers. There are a handful of retailers in the ATL market that work hard to make our city a great craft beer destination. @RDMII's store is certainly one of them. I tend to frequent a competing store because it happens to be a 10-minute walk from my office. While I recognize that competition is a real thing, these retailers collectively have worked hard to be the leaders. They've taken substantial risks. Should not all that effort be rewarded with higher allocations? I guess maybe that's asking too much for some who have not worked so hard.