Bourbon County 2017

Let me enlighten you. When everyone and their mother (literally) drives down to Chicago to take local's allocations, it forces people to camp out for over 12 hours to get beer at the Binny's release. Increase price and it makes it more convenient for people than having to camp out for 12 hours and it makes people reconsider whether it makes sense to drive out of state to try and get beer. As people mentioned, this is under valued. The black market profiteers are driving this insanity. Cut out their margins and increase the price of the beer. Last December was a prime example when all the Rare flooded the market and sat on shelves. No one was going to load up on $70 beer to flip when it was that expensive and the returns were not there due to supply.

 

Not gonna be able to find the posts, in regard to ABVs and bottling dates. But I have a July 18 Stout at 14.1% and a October Stout at 14.7%.

I believe my Northwoods was bottled in June. Someone mentioned the coffee had a very early bottle date as well.

Kinda crazy that they've been bottling BCBS and variants for 5 months....

 

To be fair, Rare wasn’t exactly a shelf turd. You had several days to buy it, but it also came and went. I bought one to trade but it also wasn’t there a week later when I tried the same gambit

 

I think the big head scratcher here is that for the past 3-4 years the LP sale has been well managed and the best place to go for Bourbon County. How did Binnys drop the ball so hard this year?

 

I can't see Goose changing anything. They don't care that diehards can't get all the variants. The variant hype just adds to the overall BCBS hype. The average beer drinker doesn't even know that variants exists; they'll be glad to hit Jewel and grab "that beer that everyone was waiting in line for."

 

Easier for the people that really want to drink it, harder for everyone else like the flippers and mules. Raising retail prices only hurts the flippers as the motivation for MAX PROFITZ goes way down when there’s only a small gap between retail and secondary and there’s just a couple bucks an hour to be made for the time in line.

 

The reality is, people who have the money (i.e. people who likely make a good income) are in favor of raising prices instead of waiting and potentially not getting anything because they value their time more than others.

People who are not as financially well off would prefer to trade time for beer, because their time is less valuable.

It's a very simple equation...you either trade more money for beer or more time for beer. Neither one is inherently bad, it's just a different trade-off.

With that said, I'm sure plenty of people who waited 12+ hours at LP are also financially well-off. That's more of a testament to how good the beer is. And I assume there are people out there like me who could definitely afford the secondary market but don't want to deal with it.

From an economics perspective, however, raising prices is really the only logical solution. Maybe not to an extreme, but to levels where it causes some people to limit the desire to hoard (say, maybe regular around $15, variants around $50ish).

 

Andersonville Wine and Spirits has a bottle of Northwood for $36.99. They also had regular and BW.

 

That is correct if you live in a bubble which no one does. It is much more complex than you make it out. When you factor in rarity and price people buy more than they otherwise would. When you factor in black market profits, people buy more than they would otherwise to resell. You can offset those by increasing price to discourage hoarding and reducing profit margins for black market resellers...

 

Seen that as well. Same place had reserve for $44....had to buy 4 regular to get receive the honor of buying a variant.

 

Thanks. I was one of the people who asked. My regular are Aug 23 and Sept 22 bottling dates. Both 14.7%.

 

I do agree with you, I was definitely being overly simplistic. I think your last sentence is spot on.

 

Wouldn't spreading out the allocations to other stores/states so that you don't have everyone gathering at one store be a better solution than raising the price? The last thing we need is beer prices getting up to wine prices. A lot less people would be coming from out of state to LP if their local market had a decent amount of regular and actually got variants.

 

Yup, like I said above, it makes it easier for you to get the beer you want seems like the underlying issue. I feel for you, everyone coming into the city to get your local beer and turning it into a total cluster, that sucks. I’m sure they could figure out ways to make it more equitable for locals.

 

I think the solution is better behaved beer hunters at LP.
Other than only 4 POS, most of the other issues are on the idiots in the line.

 

I would love to see them go back to the old way or at least have 4 packs and bomber variants as well as 500 mls..

This BS comes up every year and it is not the solution. Let's take a glimpse at recent history, anybody remember when OG Rare came out and sat on shelves for months because folks couldn't fathom paying $40 for a bottle? It took a very short period of time for beer snobs to adjust to that level of pricing. Anybody remember when the new format bottles came out in 2015 and basically the prices went from around 55 cents per once to 63 cents per ounce (15% increase). Not to mention Goose clearly has less packaging costs with the new bottles. It took zero time to adjust to the increase in price and I would argue that 2015 was the most fever pitched year of them all. Jacking up the price is not going to change anything. If Toppling Goliath started charging $500 for KBBS, zero bottles would collect dust at any store or at their brewery. The other part of it is that you are assuming what rational people would do. These folks are not rational. If they were, they wouldn't drive hundreds of miles to sit outside in 30 degree weather on Thanksgiving Day and then camp out over night, just for beer. At any rate, I commend the breweries for not profiteering on the excitement, which seems to be fairly industry standard. I think they realize that gouging is a very quick means of ticking off customers and having them boycott your other brands.

 

Anyone I've talked to had it pretty rough. BloNo was the place to be downstate this year. Glad you had a good run yesterday. People I know there had similar hauls. Consider yourself lucky you didn't run the gauntlet of LP.

Champaign was a wasteland. Binny's was 1 case of Coffee '17, 1 case of Coffee '16, NW, BW, and reg. I had several friends in line in the first 15. Only one got a 17' Coffee. No Reserve. I think they were the only place in town that got any variants, which is kind of crazy. I know of 2 other places that should have, but only got reg and barley.

I know one Ba who scored a few Reserve in KY. Not sure if their experience was the norm or not. I'll let them chime in on that if they feel the need.

 

Eh to me there's not a perfect solution to this problem but I am generally in favor of keeping prices lower. If someone really wants a beer then they can do the line madness to get it and pay a reasonable price. If someone really wants a beer and has a lot of disposable income they can just buy it online for a higher price than MSRP. Raising the MSRP benefits the latter group but they can just pay the higher price anyway.

 

Armanetti's in Rolling Meadows

 

Yeah, took me about 30 minutes total including drive time to score 3 bottles of Reserve at 2 different stores in Southern Kentucky. Didn’t see any others at those stores. Heard a couple of stores did get 1 case of the regular though.

We will be sharing one of those reserves soon my friend!