Great Notion

I actually tend to agree. Having spent a week with Sticky Hands Tropical Slam and Ex Novo Eliot in the fridge and chasing PtY, I'm wholly underwhelmed by Juice Box given the hype. It falls off on the backend pretty noticeably. Also don't really dig the atmosphere or prices at Great Notion. Hope they keep fine tuning things though, a lot of promise.

 

I snagged a crowler of Notorious for $9... so gtfo with that $17 crowler mess!

Or maybe Notorious isn't made with those top-quality ingredients...never knew I liked bum swill...

 

I feel like a lot of people are either mad or defensive about unconfirmed prices...will someone check this out? For science?


If not I guess we can all keep being old and crotchety about what might happen.

 

I brought home a crowler of Ripe for $12 last weekend because I thought it was worth it (I actually enjoy Ripe more than Juice Box). Will I do it all the time? No, its a bit of a splurge because yeah, that's a pretty expensive crowler.

If it was $7.50 for a bomber of Ripe (same $/oz), would people still be complaining? I doubt it, $7.50 doesn't seem so bad for a bomber of world class IPA.

 

If this is $22 for 64 oz that's well in line with other hoppy breweries ... Trillium dry hopped beers are $23 for 64 / $12 for 32. They have one DIPA for $25 for 64. Hill Farmstead has some that are $22+ (for 2L so you get a bonus 4 oz). If they're using the same copious hop quantities, seems ballpark.

 

Here's my receipt from picking up a couple crowlers:

 

Whoa! $17 now?!
I paid $15 last Friday

 

Back to my point, $17 for a 32 oz fill of an IPA absurd. They aren't using some groundbreaking ingredients, total BS argument.

 

I'm always surprised at how much cheaper draft beer is in Portland compared to Seattle.

 

Yeah it's a great beer, but the math just doesn't add up.
1 crowler is ~2.3 of their 14oz tulips, which are $6 on tap. That comes out to $13.80...so where is the extra $3.20 coming from in the crowler price?

 

Not surprised, depressed. But I guess Seattle's always been better at business and economics

 

I just checked. Assuming you rent, you would need $4762 in Portland to have the same quality of life as in Burlington, VT for $4600. I'm assuming Portland and Burlington are the priciest places in each state. Boston is obviously MUCH different. So obviously just saying "East Coast" obscures a more granular reality.

And yet, the top quality IPAs in each place cost the same. Maybe it's the cost of ingredients, the fact that they are small breweries (as the Great Notion folks claimed) without the advantages of scale. Or maybe it's something else ...

Not a well worked out theory here but I'd venture to guess that beer prices, at least for things that are in a specialized mode (like super hazy IPAs), will be increasingly decoupled from local market factors. Bud and macro stuff more or less costs the same everywhere; people know the price. When craft beer was more local - and by that, I mean made locally and consumed largely in the same locale - it would make sense for places that are less expensive and have a lot of competitors to experience price pressure. People compared local to local. For Great Notion ... are people (at least some) going to compare the price to Deschutes Fresh Squeezed and Alameda Yellow Wolf ... or maybe to Heady, Tree House, etc? Similarly, all the BA saisons around Portland (with the exception of De Garde) tend to fall right in line with prices elsewhere. Maybe (some) people see the market not as local, but due to trading and such as a national market for IPAs of a certain type ... which would make prices align?

Just a few thoughts.

 

That may be a historical nicety. I'd expect it to change at places that struggle to make enough product. If I can barely keep up with demand (or can't), why would I discount volume? Maybe once I can keep up, I'd add in that discount.

 

Stopped at GN today and tasted both ripe and juice box. Had a 12 oz pour of juice box for $6 which I gladly paid. Truly don't understand all the discussion on price in this thread. Would have gladly paid $17 for a crowler fill of juice box however they are no longer offering crowler fills because they want to "make sure they have enough for the event on Saturday." Don't know if BA discussion had any influence on this but that's the story I got.

If it's too expensive, go somewhere else. Plenty of places serving traditional NWIPA. Happy to pay a small premium for NE style IPA. Or I could go to the trade forums, take my chances on a reliable NE trade partner, wait for them to gather up a few NE IPAs and pay twice the premium to have them shipped this way and lose their hop character due to lack of temp control, instead of supporting a local business that's been open for a couple months and brewing on a 7 bbl system. Not exactly my idea of being a beer advocate. To each his own.

Cheers to Great Notion. You rocked my palate today!

 

Word. I stopped by Great Notion on Saturday for Juice Box and was blown away -- one of the best DIPAs I've had in a long time. Maybe because it's a refreshing departure from the typical fare around here. Maybe not. I don't know, I just loved it. Price didn't even cross my mind at the time; in retrospect, I still don't think it seems atypical, and I'd gladly pay it again. I'll definitely be going back.

 

I think we all need to cut GN some slack. Clearly they haven't had an easy time getting started and it appears they will continue to fine tune for the foreseeable future. Was only in there once so far and they only had one of their IPAs to offer. I'm looking forward to trying the full line up Saturday and hope they can get it all figured out. The one thing I noticed on my previous visit was the service wasn't all that great. I hope they can handle this event. 1st impressions are important.