Any Parabola left in Bay Area?

not to beat a dead horse, but... come on, really? who is surprised at this point?

this is why i boycott firestone.

 

At this point you just look silly. Anyone who couldn't find Parabola in the Bay Area wasn't looking.

OP, Parabola was all over the place. I was in Europe when it was released and still saw it on shelves a bunch of places. I think the Oakland Whole Foods had some a couple weeks ago.

Your best bet to find some is a Whole Foods in the north bay. I think the one in Mill Valley, maybe? I forget the town. But I was there in early May and they still had Abacus. Call around to that area and ask, you have reasonable odds.

 

tell that to the op, not me. i stopped looking after this nonsense began 2 years ago.

edit: i see none of your answers involve actually looking for it in sf, where he lives... i think we're both saying the same thing: to find it, you have to hunt around. no thanks.

 

That's because there aren't enough beer stores in SF for the demand. Shit, Healthy Spirits posted on FB that they just got some Simtra in and expected it to go quickly, and that beer's crap. If you want to buy bottles of anything that's limited at all you're going to need to leave SF or be on top of the release. I fail to see how that's the brewery's fault, it's not like they tell the wholesaler to short the city (or orchestrated the undersupply of higher-end beer stores). Besides, depending on OP's situation getting to a north bay whole foods could be easier than getting to City Beer. It's not like I told him to go to Benicia, this is right over the Golden Gate.

If you don't think the beer is worth driving 20 minutes for then that's fine, but being all "lol firestone blowz" is silly. Maybe they really do undersupply the San Diego area, but the OP gives you no reason to believe that. And the conclusion you drew from the OP, as far as I can tell, is that Firestone's limited releases are hard to find in the Bay Area because Firestone undersupplies here, which is flat-out false.

 

Monument Wine & Spirits still has a few on the shelf.

 

If you're willing to drive to Santa Rosa, Bottle Barn just got a couple of more cases in. That is as long as daysinthewake didn't buy them all.

 

i drew the conclusion that it's tough to get in san francisco, based on his comment that he hadn't even seen it. your misdirection about other cities isn't really addressing that. saying it's a demand issue is more or less agreeing with me: they don't meet the demand in metros in their home state, and haven't for 3 years now.

they have sacrificed their home market to stock gas stations in new jersey. it's frustrating.

 

After the Parabola-hunting frenzy I had shortly after release this year (having grossly overpaid for at least half of my stash), I started seeing it pop up in numerous spots, like the aforementioned Oakland Whole Foods, and various BevMo's around the Bay Area. More recently, I agree that it hasn't been showing up at all in the immediate vicinity, but I have seen it in spots further afield, like Davis, and Santa Rosa.

If you're still having trouble tracking down bottles, shoot me a BM - if anything, I probably overdid it a bit with my Parabola buying, and could swap a bottle or two.

 

What brewery isn't this true of?

Also, your point about San Francisco getting too little is borderlined insane because that's not actually up to Firestone, it's up to the distributors. The area as a whole gets the right amount, the fact that the distributors give more to outlying areas (alternatively, that Whole Foods ordering sends as much to Mill Valley as to the stores in SF, or at least doesn't distribute it as they should) is really, really not Firestone's fault.

 

russian river, lost abbey, sierra nevada, lagunitas, north coast?

i'll give you another chance to be clever: does the same distributor service san francisco, oakland, and the other cities you mentioned?

 

This is definitely true of RR (why is Pliny going to So Cal, Colorado, etc, when it can't stay on shelves in Santa Rosa?), Lagunitas doesn't bottle anything special, North Coast prices things higher than most and that's why they sit. I don't actually know enough about LA because I don't buy their stuff, but I bet people got shut out of Red Poppy and I saw that around here.

Based on my experience some huge fraction of Firestone special releases around here are sold through BevMo and Whole Foods (hell, the OP in this thread said he mainly looked in Whole Foods). I know for a fact that Whole Foods' beer distribution covers the entire area, I think the employee I was speaking with said it went up to friggin' Tahoe or something. I'd be shocked if the same weren't true for BevMo. So a huge part of the "problem" of undersupply of SF in favor of outlying areas are those stores all getting about the same amount. (And they get way more than craft beer stores, the random small craft beer stores I know get 1-3 cases, last year I saw like 6 at my local BevMo.) Speaking with people in SF last year the BevMos were all sold out on the same day, my local one had it for weeks.

As far as actual distributors, I think I found the Firestone distributor for San Francisco, Matgrano Inc, and they do San Francisco and San Mateo counties, so definitely not just the city.

Regardless of all of that, it's really hard to know how this actually works. I've spoken with people who handle beer ordering who say that distributors don't order as much as they can from the brewery out of ignorance. I can't remember what beer we were talking about, and I doubt it was Firestone, but it's really hard to know where in the nexus of "brewery supplying enough to area, distributors ordering enough, stores ordering enough, intra-store balancing done correctly, etc" the problem actually lies. Assuming the blame is all on Firestone is silly, in my view. You're absolutely free to do that, if you wish, but I think it's silly.

 

I've seen scores of bottles sitting on shelves at nearly half a dozen stores in LA over the last few weeks. They appear to have distribution hiccups in patches of CA, but in much of the state it's never been easier to get FW special releases.

In LA, as in other state metros, it doesn't last very long at the big beer geek hotspot shops, but if you hit up decent liquor stores off the BA radar there's so much Parabola/Abacus around it isn't funny.

It's far, far tougher for me to get a hold of bottles of Pliny or BRUX than Abacus or Parabola. Can Abacus or Parabola still be hard to track down, depending on your location? Sure, but that's in no way unique to FW - there are dozens of threads in this forum dedicated to some variation of "Where can I find Row 2/Brux/Mo Betta/etc?"

 

that's silly. you can find it at the brewery, bottle barn, petaluma market, and whole foods santa rosa, all places i have hit up while in the area.

that's silly. sucks?

are you talking about internal distribution? that's a different subject, silly.

yes, but they don't cover the other places you mentioned (oakland, mill valley). my point is that distributors are tightly confined, so by starving one in a higher-demand region, you ARE ignoring a market, and therefore you CAN be blamed for undersupplying it.

i think it's silly to blame distributors. you're free to do that as well, but i think it's silly.

that's a fair point, but i think most of those are made in much smaller quantities than a 36k+ bottle release.

 

I've tried to buy it and had it be sold out at all of those places. Yes, including the brewery. The San Rafael Whole Foods actually had a sign up while I was there saying "Pliny is out, please stop asking us about it" (in essence, not a direct quote, though I do have a picture of it). Not Sonoma,

A seasonal isn't the same thing as a special release. They don't bottle anything BA, even though they make it. Have you had a hard time finding Firestone Solace? Because that's the same level.

At this point I think you're just trolling me or being willfully dense. BevMo and Whole Foods (and who knows what other chains) are a big part of the distribution, because they share somewhat evenly that makes it harder to get in high-demand spots that THEY undersupply. This is not Firestone's fault.

Yes, and as I also said you don't actually know that they're starving it. Maybe Firestone is giving them plenty, but they're spreading it around the whole area so it sells like hotcakes in SF but lingers in San Mateo. And the reason I didn't specify a spot in San Mateo is because I have gotten out of my car there like once. Someone who's familiar with the area might know a spot. (Actually, my coworker whose wife works in Palo Alto mentioned that she got him a bottle in a store in Palo Alto/Mountain View, not sure which, not too long ago. So maybe there is still some there.)

I'm not blaming the distributors, I'm blaming no one.

You're the one who has an ax grind against Firestone, and you're making basically 0 case that would convince anyone with a brain that it's actually their fault. So make a positive argument because "it was hard to find one time."

Incidentally, that you hold yourself to significantly lower standards than everyone else is disappointing.

 

no - that these chains exist doesn't mean they are always used the way you say. it is unlikely that a chain would concentrate supply in an area with weak demand. especially liquor-savvy chains.

basically the same thing i said above. it goes both ways.

this thread is proof that it remains hard to find in a specific metro; so is this one (note the comments about some stores getting a single alloted case) - i don't see how that's so hard to grasp. the next point of blame is the distributor, but it goes against their business model to distribute against demand, so that's an unlikely culprit. which leaves....

i mean, you realize you're just as anecdotally arguing about how easy it is to get as i'm arguing anecdotally about how hard it is to get, right? at least my argument isn't predicated on some non-intuitive shenanigans by a distributor. on the other hand, i DO know firestone has made it clear that they plan to prefer out of state markets:

http://tinypic.com/r/30htw0j/6

we can't all have the same high level of non-stop posting quality that you do.

 

It's San Francisco - this happens with any release of even moderate hype/rarity.

OP, if you haven't gotten any leads by the time you read this, PM me.

 

Vacaville- Bevmo
Santa Rosa-bottle barn ( your best bet)