18th Street Bourbon Barrel Aged Hunter release

Glad you brought this up as I was wondering about this as well. Not sure how much there could be to comment on as it seems like the whole thing was over in two minutes. And I was planning on stopping in on my way home from rare day ... Sheesh

 

2 minutes????? Not even close.

I made the mistake of thinking people had jobs to go to on Fri morning & got there at 8:45am. I was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in line (read around the corner of the next block). After about an hour or so there were a couple of tweets/FB about tickets (if you have one you are guaranteed bottles) but the problem is that the person handing out tickets didn't move. They sat near the door & gave them to people as they reached that point so people left the line thinking it was sold out but it wasn't. 30-45min or so later someone actually walked the line saying it's highly unlikely we were getting any but that coconut is available...very few people left the line. Another 45 min or so they announced that BA was officially sold out & again few people left the line; I drove 1.5hrs so I was taking something, anything home with me.
3hrs after getting in line I was finally able to get inside where I waited in line for (in order) the bathroom, bottles then a pour of BA Hunter. After I got my pour it started to empty out as several people said they were going to Rare Day. From what I heard you needed to be in line ~7:20ish to have gotten bottles of BA Hunter

18th Street tries really hard to be efficient but they just don't have the floor space....1 person would take bottle orders, hand it to the next gal that would ring you up while Drew & crew filled your order. All in all they move quickly & bust their butts but the biggest issue I see is that once they are at capacity (fire code wise) they wait for 5 people to leave before allowing the next 5 in the building

 

It was a mess. I really don't care if I got bottles or not. You know what really grinds my gears is communication. There were 300-400 people in line and supposedly there was 1200 bottles. Reported by people who talked to the "overlord" the night before. Well, there was less than 600 bottles available for release. Which is ok…but why not hand out tickets at 9am?!? At least I wouldn't have stranded in line for 2 hours. Anyways. There are better ways to release beers. Handing out tickets at 8:30-9am would have been great. You know how many bottles you have and how many people are in line. Pretty simple imho.

 

Awww shit, I hope not but there were many of us in line that were saying that the bottle count vs how many got bottles did seem off. We chalked it up to bottles being sent to events or help for people in the "club"

One thing that I loved at Jester King for their releases is that they got a blck light stamp so you could barely see it then once you bought bottles they would stamp your arm 4-5x on the inside of one arm or the other (Fri was right, Sat was left & Sun was right again) and they had hand held blacklight flashlights checking them. Maybe something like that could help if that was indeed an issue

 

Had the same experience. Drove 1.5hrs got in line about 8:10. Missed out on the BA Hunter but did grab some coconut hunter. Line moved pretty slow. Once inside it was pretty dead in the front room. Taproom was a little more crowded. Got a pour of both within 5 minutes.

Saturday morning at Penrose for the 18th st collab was a great time. Huge bottle share before hand.. Drew walked thru the entire line and poured BA Hunter out of bottles for anyone that wanted it. Tom had a sixtel of Coconut hunter on a dolly w/ a tank of co2 pouring right in front of him.

 

Release was fine to me - got there at 6:15am with a group of 7 of us from Wisconsin and we got our beer, it was nice they had hunter variants on sale to go as well. Had a few beers on tap, and then made it to Three Floyds for a nice lunch too.

 

I got there around 7:45 and I got my full allotment. I'd say they ran out of tickets about 100 people behind me (rough guess). Agreed that communication could have been better. Took me about an hour to get inside once they started letting people in. It would be nice for future releases if thy had a to go line. Might be tough logistically but for those of us that needed to get to work, it would have gotten the line moving a lot quicker.

 

I would echo the comments above. My other point would be that if they truly only released 600 bottles, why advertise it? They had to know that an announced release of BA Hunter would draw a significant crowd and at x3 per person (which is absurd on a 600 bottle release) very, very few would get the release. Why not do a quiet release? Or do x1 per person? Kudos to those who arrived before 7am (seriously, you people are champs) but it just seemed to be short sighted on 18th Street's part.

 

I got there around 7:30 and was maybe 150 in line. It did take awhile to get in to purchase because there were only letting in 3-5 people at a time. I had someplace to be at 11:00 so I did not stick around to sample. May have missed it above; how was it?

 

I arrived at 815 and got in line at 820 after walking past an overwhelmingly large line. I stood next to some nice people and everyone was making conversation. We figured we were about 300ish in line and with a 3 bottle limit and a 1200 bottle total we would be fine. The line barely moved at 9am and we all thought it was going to move very quickly because it was cash only. Maybe we should have known that was a bad sign of things to come.

We saw people and 18th street employees walking up and down the line counting how many people were in line and we thought that was a good sign and that they might reduce limits to spread the good fortunes. After about a 45 min wait 18th street released info on social media that they were sold out, hope was low, but people were still walking out with bottles so we assumed they were just warning those who were thinking of coming to stay at home.

At the hour fifteen mark we find out about the tickets and no one around me had any so we waited for the official word from an employee that it was officially sold out.

Overall it was an ok experience. I guess I should have known better than to show up about 45 min before release on a rather popular Friday.

 

I got in line at approx 805 and was among the last 10 to get bottles. Don't know if anyone else noticed but around 830 a girl from 18th walked by us and was clearly counting people. She stopped a little after us and didn't bother to count the maybe 60 additional in line at that point. The staff never made an announcement on tickets being handed out and I did wonder why I was reading about it on Facebook before an announcement in person was made. Could have been handled better but it is what it is. People would have bitched if the allotment was reduced, people who still missed out would have still bitched, the few people that got there at 4am to be first in line would have bitched if it was reduced. There's no way to make everyone happy.

 

Hopefully they'll have a better setup and process once they move to the new facilities.

 

LOL

 

Not sure why that is funny

 

You don't find it patently absurd that you have to be in line on a Friday morning before 7:30 AM to get bottles of BA Hunter?

 

I was giving my estimate based on talking to people but yes I do which is why I got there at 8:45am and was shut out

 

Ergo, LOL. (Not your being shut out, the absurdity of what this 'culture/scene/whatever it is' has become)