Tree House Brewing Company (March 2016)

Posting from phone is hard, lol. Last night was great - got there at 6:35 out with cans and growlers at 6:50. Got here today at 2:55 and was 25th in line. Looking forward to an ESB.

 

Definitely in the same boat as you in your last sentence there. In regards to their staples I agree that Green stands out for me as one of the best I've had. But I have yet to try many of their most coveted, which is why I was hoping for a big hitter on Saturday. I'm assuming cans of Old Man will remain, it would take quite the crowd to burn through 300 cases (not that it hasn't happened before) but now everyone has me more interested to try something that doesn't come along too often. Not normally a huge ESB fan, but if it's brewed by TH it has to be pretty good. I know that many thought Bright was a different kind of brew for them but that really stood out to me

 

Like MA last week, the Old Man release gets me excited that maybe I could just stroll in at 5pm on Saturday and get it. Of course they'll be sold out by 2:45 and I won't make it out there

 

I won't be home, but I'll leave a can of Julius from last week on my porch, just drop off a can of Old Man

 

It would probably be pretty interesting and informative to put together a log that includes what beers are on, how many pp, and how many cases are sold each day.

Translate the case amounts into "people" and you can start to get an idea about how many people go to Tree House on a given day, depending on stuff like the weather, exclusivity of releases, etc. You can also see which beers are more popular, e.g. Alter Ego and Haze are released at 6pp each with 450 cases, but the next day, AE has 30 more cases available. You can see that people are more likely to max out on Haze.

Tree House kinda threw a wrench in that though now that they no longer announce initial case amounts on Wednesday...

You could also use twitter can line updates to get a feel for the busier times of the night, depending on which beer is on.

In the end, you could probably put together a decent amount of data that would more or less tell you if it's worth it to go (you'll have a rough release schedule at this point), the chances of you getting beer, the best times where the line is smallest, etc. After a while, you'd have all the different can combinations: e.g. Alter Ego, Julius, and Eureka is typically less crazy than Green, King Julius, and Curiosity.

Take into account silent releases as a guaranteed "heavy" day.

I bet if you really factored in every variable, you'd find patterns, even when Tree House does their best to mix things up. Hell, there are general patterns I and many others have noticed now (some that I've outlined in my previous post on the other page).

Of course, you probably wouldn't be able to accrue enough data to be truly accurate with predictions, considering how rapidly the brewery is changing right now. Just a year or so ago they hadn't canned a single beer. Four months ago, Tree House was WAYYYY different than they are now. Can Wednesday just recently popped up now that they're doing 4 runs a week. We used to be lucky to see 2-3.

And now I probably (still) sound like an insane person for thinking this far into it all. Tree House guys must be reading this, laughing their asses off!

 

ISO: Statistician.

 

It could be a fun project actually! I already obsessively check Twitter and refresh the On Tap page. I guess it would be a little less tedious if I enjoy the data I'm analyzing?

 

Line is about 100 deep right now

 

Glad to see Old Man being released. I've never had it, but it's nice to see TH take on non hoppy or stout beers. I love MA and look forward to the return of Bear. I can't make it for Old Man, but hopefully I'll get some at some point. Now, time to crack open this beautiful Green can...

 

Here are the cans for 2016. Been tracking it as a bit of a hobby and way to improve my Excel skills. I had a nice Pivot Chart that showed trend but it doesn't translate well here. Simple copy and paste and you can probably do your own.

Some of the latest case numbers were pure guesses.

Wednesdays lately have seen about 1100-1500 people come thru, Thursdays about 500-1000 (Very Hazy day), Fridays about 250 - 650 (Very Hazy leftover, Bright day), Saturdays about 400. These numbers are just guesses and based on can sales only. I don't track growler fills as I usually don't want to wait around to get them.

Type Amount Date
Julius 500 6-Jan
Green 500 6-Jan
Curiosity 24 250 7-Jan
TWSS 270 8-Jan
Lights On 500 13-Jan
Alter Ego 450 13-Jan
Very Green 185 14-Jan
Eureka w Citra 575 20-Jan
Sap 500 20-Jan
Julius 500 21-Jan
Doppleganger 215 22-Jan
Haze 475 27-Jan
Green 500 27-Jan
King Julius 165 28-Jan
Single Shot 275 29-Jan
Julius 500 3-Feb
Green 500 3-Feb
Bright 272 4-Feb
Lights On 500 10-Feb
Haze 400 10-Feb
Julius 450 11-Feb
Green 500 17-Feb
Alter Ego 450 17-Feb
Very Hazy 155 18-Feb
Bright 250 19-Feb
Sap 500 24-Feb
Julius 500 24-Feb
Doppleganger 175 25-Feb
Ma 300 26-Feb
Haze 400 2-Mar
Alter Ego 450 2-Mar
Green 450 3-Mar
Old Man 300 4-Mar

 

Must say the art work on the old man can is awesome! One of my favorites

 

Noticed Old Man isn't available for growler fills, has that happened on a canned beer? (outside of can only weds)

 

Not that I can recall. They have sometimes saved a couple of kegs for Saturday of their more-rare releases that will kill the can allocations for Saturday. That wouldn't seem to apply here, though.

 

Seems like TH is falling into a good rhythm for making beer stretch to Saturday. Limited Wednesday to 6 per can, doing 4 can runs, and saving a small batch growler fill for Saturday seems to work well imo.

 

Agree. I can see this being the pattern for the foreseeable future

 

Hey this is neat. Looks like my estimates were pretty close.

Good jumping off point if I ever decide to do my own spreadsheet. Are you keeping track of the case amounts the following day as well? If you could link that excel sheet here, that would be pretty cool.

 

Le Peleton on tomorrow. Between that and Old Man, I'd love to be there, but the one Saturday I actually have something scheduled in the afternoon...

Seems like the release schedule this week might have spread the crowd out a little -- two solid cans (Haze and Alter Ego) Wednesday, then a special small batch Saturday -- rather than a huge rush on Thursday.

 

With haze green and AE down to around 1-3 bbl, any chance they go to two growler limits this AM? Trying to decide if I want to go today..

 

Just realized this. Is there a reason why growler fills are more expensive than cans? For example a 750 ml fill of green costs 8$ for 25 oz. of beer. 2 cans of green costs 7.50$ for 32 oz. of beer. Doesn't make sense to me.

 

So, I was thinking about the last few posts on the TH blog by Nate last year, about what their plans for the new space were, and read this

"The reason I stated it is 'unlikely' we will fill 'core' beers [in growlers] is because we anticipate having twelve lines of growler-only beers at all times. If a line runs dry and we have a few kegs of core beers to fill it with, we will fill it…! But it's our plan, right now, to dedicate the retail shop lines to more small batch projects."

I was wondering if anyone had asked Dean, Nate or anyone else involved with TH if this was still the plan, or if plans had changed.