BCS, KBS, DL, etc....All Year Long

For one thing, it's expensive, and takes up a ton of space in both tanks and barrels. Aside from that, many of the breweries that release these brews have a hard enough time keeping up with the demand for their regular lineups.

 

Marketing.

 

I think keeping them as relatively small releases increases the demand (ie marketing) as someone mentioned above. I find myself continuously passing over awesome beers on the shelf such as Two Hearted, Red's Rye PA, etc because I can get them whenever I want. I find myself grabbing more exclusive releases because in the back of my mind I know I can always go grab a sixer of Two Hearted when I want to but "X" will be gone in a week if I don't get it.

Pretty sure this is the case for a lot of people and the breweries know this.

 

You can always grab the everyday beers, but keep in mind, these beers are the driving force that gives these breweries the funds to make these special releases. Another thing that would suck about beers like this being brewed year-round would be the lack of variance in different batches/years. Being a year-round product would only drive prices of them up, along with their regular lines, because the space needed to produce the everyday beers is being consumed by the mass amounts of space needed to produce these big beers. Breweries expand when they can financially, not when people demand more product. As a person in the retail business, I'll be honest. If you are a regular at a store, but you don't buy everyday lineups of a certain brewery's beer, the less of an allocation I get on special releases. I feel bad saying it, but there have been times when I have only received six bottles of a special release from certain breweries, and I had to say we couldn't get it because employees swallowed them up. Even as the beer buyer for my store, I've missed out on releases because people won't go after the everyday brews. It's frustrating to have someone ask me why I didn't receive something and another store did. It's because certain people only seek out the rare releases, and don't support these breweries otherwise.

 

Supply and demand play a big role, but not in a simple way.


In SE PA we have Victory which produces a very nice Barleywine called Old Horizontal that wasn't brewed at all last year. They explain why in their blog.

http://victorybeer.com/blog/category/victory-beer/old-horizontal/

In addition at least 3 of their popular seasonals (and normally some of my regular purchases) have been temporarily put on the "draft only" list. I figure this is because they need the bottling line to keep up with demand for their year round flagship beers.

As for distribution, you may want to read this,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_(alcohol_distribution)

and now ask yourself this, if you were the brewer of a great beer, how would you go about getting your beer distributed widely throughout the US?

In some ways I'm surprised that those beers you mentioned get brewed and distributed at all.

 

Well long ago when there was no american barrel aged beer, no 1 cared. Back in the day when craft/micro/boutique beer was only drank by a tiny percent of beer drinkers. In fact everything was word of mouth.Well there was newsgroups, but many never knew about them. hell they were BBS before that....

RB/BA and blogs changed all that, before you used to have to be in the "KNOW", and read BOOKS. Social media has bought hype. No main stream internet no HYPE. ie WWW

Micros took off and started getting popular, well more popular anyway. Most of what makes these beers in demand is not how good they are or not, but the trade bait. Some brewers choose to fuel this fire, some don't. Human nature is to want what you cannot have, its basic.

The rest is willingness to supply that demand or not. Most small places should not and cannot grow to meet this demand for the rare, in fact if they did it would STOP being special and RARE!!! its a catch 22 really.
Beyond that its really just common sense.

 

I always enjoy the insane amount of pure speculation in these threads that gets presented as fact.

 

Welcome to the internet.

 

Limited and special releases are not what lines the breweries pocket books as much as people would like to believe. Year round beers are the bread winners and what allows breweries to produce these special beers. The stouts that you mention cost more for raw materials, take up more time in the tank, time in the barrel and then more time to condition than any other beer in their year round portfolio. You make one of these beers year round you would probably need to cut at least two beers out of your normal line up. When you could produce and move 10+ batches of a year round in the time it would take to get 1 batch of the specialty beer to bottles it just does not make sense to brew these more than once a year. Anyone who wants to claim this is simply marketing, breweries driving up hype and demand is very short sighted.

 

its beer talk not beer fact, if it was not much else could be said, could it?

 

before rb/ba the monks made ales all day long and they were no lines. Very few cared. No 1 is blamed them or any other brewer for hype. I blame the net. Before the net, news traveled allot slower. How popular do you think all these whales would be without the net? and social media? how many read newspapers? trust me all the hype is because of boards like this 1 and not much else. it helps that the beer is really good! but word of mouth, you have few lines for these things..In fact I bet a few would keep it secret.

 

When you think about it the fact you can get any KBS when it's available is kinda amazing. You have to brew a hell of a lot of beer to spread it as they do even though it's thin. It must consume a hell of a lot of barrel space too. I love Founders Stouts, and if space is the problem and it's workable I'd cut down the brewing list. I can live without Dirty Bastard, Red Rye, I don't like their IPA or DIPA either. LOL, I'd be fine if they only brewed FBS and KBS, and they get a good price, Bourbon barrels availability could be an issue though..

 

I like limited time/seasonal beers, personally...

 

Every time anyone wonders why brewers don't just make their higher-demand beers an all-year round, I tell them one of the biggest wisdoms in modern marketing.

"Make people feel like they're missing out on something, and they will buy it."

When the offer goes up, demand will pretty much invariably go down. I didn't remember much from my Economics 101, but that one did stick.

 

They make more money on the smaller stuff. The little beers take less time to make, sell in larger volume, cost less in materials and don't require them to deal with whiny nerds who complain about release day not being done in their desired fashion.

Posters on these forums are an extremely rare minority of the beer consuming world. You would buy a $20 bottle of Rare every time, but if they made nothing but rare all year round, they would have to close their doors. BAs don't buy enough beer to keep the really big stuff going.

Talk to any brewer. Milds pay the bills.

 

BCBS is supposedly going to become year round, which is a matter of having the space for all those barrels. KBS is the same way, but not owned by inBev so their capacity for growth is smaller. Dark Lord, I have no idea. I know they probably have a hard time keeping up with their regular lineup, but at some point it should be since it's not barrel aged for a year like KBS. Even at a high price, they could eventually do Dark Lord as a release a few times a year and easily sell out no problem.

 

Are BB's used more than once to age beer? If not are there enough of them to make KBS ect year round?

 

Just to verify you are talking about Founders potential to produce more KBS is tied to space and not that it is going year round correct? Founders will be producing more but not producing it year round. With a recent expansion they now have the space and resource to make more but no where needed to brew it year round. The advantage GI has after the buyout is multiple locations to brew other beers with allows Laffler and his crew in Chicago more time and space to focus on what will be put in barrels.

You get diminishing returns after every use and most breweries use barrels once, twice at most.

 

Yeah, I wasn't clear. I meant that KBS is the same way in terms of barrel aging so there's more space needed for a longer period of time for all the barrels. To continuously turnover barrels for a year round release, I think they'd need to have a lot more space and funding like AB can provide to GI. I was comparing them both to DL, which doesn't need all that time or space in bourbon barrels.