Bruery 2018 RS/HS Allocations

If you listen to their Bruery Radio podcast, the most recent episode featured their production manager who used to work at Trumer, so I'm guessing that helped!

 

Too bad it's the same day as Noble's anniversary party. Wish they would have coordinated.

 

Speaking of which, when are cans of Humulus Lager coming back?

 

@BruerJoel What's the details with the SMM reward of early admittance for the H&W festival? For session 1, will that be before noon, or is the early admission at noon and the general admission later?

 

From what I hear, it’s the only way to get a bottle of it.

 

I think for lowly RS members like me it is. Lol. HS gets access in March

 

List coming soon. Most from Bruery Terreux beers for the event are event-premiering / new small batch releases.

 

Bruery, please train staff to properly fill crowlers. Got a Bruesicle of Kicapi on Sat evening and carbonation disappeared within 10-15 seconds after poured right now.

 

Drop me a line so we can make it right!

 

I know this has been discussed and Bruery apologists will get mad at me for bringing it up again but...

The Society fulfillment center is still in need of improvement, in my opinion. I STILL cannot understand why they need 24 hours to put beers in a box. I would genuinely be interested in hearing someones explanation, or theories, for why this is.

This past weekend I found myself headed to the OC at around noon. I knew from recent experiences and bitchfighting on here that the new policy is 24 hours notice. Fine. Thought I'd email them anyway just to see. As others have suggested on here. Said I'd be down there at around 9pm. Full disclosure I am picking up for myself, and for a friend. We probably each have about 2 cases of beer.

Unnamed Society employee wrote back and said they wouldn't be able to do it. He was very polite, and got back promptly, so that was nice. But.. I'm sorry, I still can't wrap my head around why it takes more than 6 hours to put some beers in a box. Someone please explain it to me. Explain the physics behind it.

He actually said he would need "a few days" to fulfill the order. I have the email. Again, this is probably a biggish order, but definitely not more than 2 or 3 cases each.

I'm nearing the end of the cut off date for my 2017 beers so it's frustrating.

I know this isn't as important to everyone but for me if they don't improve the fulfillment window it's a deal-breaker for next year.

And yes, I've already passed along my concerns to the Bruey.

 

Only thing I got is if they keep some of those bottles at offsite storage. But that is only a guess and I don't think they do. *shrugs*

 

I can't speak from experience. I've only been there once for a pickup. Outside of that, I have everything shipped.

However, as I understand it, the beer is no longer on site. If they are not running a truck back and forth more than once per day, then I can see them needing a day to compile your order, pull it, and deliver it to the fulfillment center. And that's assuming there are no errors.

Now answer me this. If they can pull your beers, put them in a box, and have them ready for you in 24hrs, Why does it take 2 weeks + to hand the box to the GSO pickup guy for shipping?

 

They do have offsite storage at their Crowther warehouse. Sometimes they run out and can't fill the order. I have had orders held up because someone just came in and depleted the stock.

I always give them a 24 hour notice at least, sometimes 48 hour if I'm picking up some rare HS stuff. I live around the corner from there, but I always make sure I follow their rules. When I lived further away I would keep contact with them to make sure it was resolved before I got there.

The volume may be higher this year, but I know they are working their asses off when I get there.

 

My guess is this is purely a behind-the-scenes, boring-ass logistical thing. So I'll match that with a boring-ass, speculative rant that attempts at the explanation you seek. This is not to excuse either you or them-- it's obviously a bit annoying for you, but it also seems (to me) reasonable for them to put these kinds of parameters around pickups. It's just the way they have decided to run their business, with the overall goal, probably, of operational efficiencies for them (maybe minimizing the number of employees they need on staff, or keeping storage costs down by use of multiple facilities, or whatever) and a pretty pleasant, quick pick-up experience for you (by having your shit ready and staged very close to the pick-up desk before you arrive, so you can go in and out in a quick visit and there is very little chance of an error in your order).

So I'm sure they are not taking your order, printing it out, and then literally working non-stop for 24 hours (or "a few days", or even 6 hours) to get it ready for you. Instead, I'm guessing they have a carefully-considered routine of tallying up all of the pickup orders received each day, collating all of the bottles as they make their rounds through the various storage facilities, packing them for each individual order, and marking and storing them so they can easily get each order when the customer shows up. And they give themselves 24 hours to do this whole dance for however many orders they receive. Maybe this "long" window even allows them to throttle staffing up or down for the next day, depending on how many requests they have and how absurdly large some of those orders are for pickup. So while you have "just" 2 or 3 cases of beer, and it seems like a ridiculously long time for them to gather your meager assortment of beers, I'm sure they have visitors (particularly with proxy pickups) who have dozens of cases of beer there, and there may coincidentally be several people like that who want to pick up on the same day. So The Bruery has just given themselves a standard 24-hour window (again, not unreasonable to me) to deal with all of that shit and make it manageable for them and relatively stress-free for you.

I used to work in logistics for a battery manufacturer in a large warehouse distribution center, where we had about thirty 55-foot trailers coming-and-going every day with thousands of batteries across several hundred different SKU's. We would constantly deplete and replenish our battery stock in our warehouse (keeping the narrowest margin of overstock we possibly could, onhand at any given time), and pick-pack-and-ship every day to get all of the proper quantities and orders out to all of our hundreds of clients, for delivery the next day. We aggregated orders throughout the day and worked to get them all loaded up on pallets so our delivery drivers could come in the next morning and head out as early as possible with trucks as full as possible, to make deliveries. This was totally standard protocol in the industry. We also had a couple of "hotshot" trucks that were smaller (including one pickup truck), and could potentially be used to rush an order and make something happen very quickly, like same-day or within hours or even minutes, to get someone a delivery because of a fuck-up or something like that (usually ours). Basically, one person would take the order and go throughout the warehouse and gather all of the individual items, and pack, log, load, and deliver it themselves. Great customer service, right? But the hotshot process was a horribly inefficient use of our resources, and there is no way we could have met expectations for all of our customers by doing every order that way-- we would have had to hire 2 or 3 times as many people, probably, and increase our prices to pay for that level of service.

 

Another thing to note is that the Crowther warehouse stores beers together in collections of cases on multiple different levels. So not only would they need to get an employee to drive to the other warehouses to get your beers, but they would need to have a forklift certified employee standing by to take the pallets (not sure if this is the right word) down off of the different levels, collect all of your beers together, and then get it to the driver. 24 hours, on the other hand, lets all the "forklifting" and other associated tasks be done at a particular time every day. Seems reasonable to me, fwiw.

It should also probably be noted that if you have an order just of the last two months worth of releases, they are almost always prepared to fulfill that order at a moments notice. It's only the releases older than this that get moved to the warehouses.

 

You say that like it's a ridiculous idea. "They would need to have someone drive a fork lift" etc.. If part of their business model is storing and distributing beer to customers then I would expect that they would have something in place like that. Is that crazy? Maybe they could have someone doing it more than once a day.

I just think there's room for improvement. I understand not expecting to get giant orders at a moments notice. But almost any order should be able to be handled within the amount of time you would spend at the tasting room. 5 hours should definitely be enough time.

Maybe they should consider having their society employees working at this other mysterious location instead of at Dunn way. Have all the beer there, and all pick ups there.

I can't think of any other retail shipping / pick-up product that requires this much advance notice.

To make a dumb joke that's also true, I could have packed up 3 cases of beer in the amount of time it took me to read @cquiroga's post

 

Were all the beers recent releases (within the last year)? If so, I have felt your pain. Might I suggest trying a new approach. Send the email saying you are picking up the next morning. They will likely fulfill the request within a couple hours, and then you can get them earlier.
Last time I emailed them like 2 hours later I got an email saying the order was ready for pick up, but I was only getting bottles that were released a couple months prior.

 

I'm not sure its viable to have employees in the warehouse just for these kind of tasks. Of course they have forklift certified employees whenever the warehouse is open, but those employees are also loading/unloading trucks, quality control, preparing shipments for the next day etc. I just don't think it is that feasible to be able to expect employees to drop their other, regular tasks when a club member shows up at the tasting room. Sometimes the warehouses aren't busy, and I've had situations where an order has been prepared day of as a result. But I don't expect this to always be possible.

I mean, isn't 24 hours almost completely standard for these kind of beer clubs? I know the others I am a part of have the same exact guideline. It might not be your or mine favorite part of these clubs, but I've kind of come to accept it as part of the business model.

I'd love for this to be improved, too. But having just a bit of familiarity with what goes into these warehouses, I firmly expect that it's a lot more complicated than we tend to recognize.

 

Try being a D.C. member. That should be interesting to do pick-ups. If they missed anything then what?

 

Again, you make it sound like getting customers their paid-for product is an extra task, not as important as their usual tasks. I would think getting customers their product is an important task for the business, and they should staff accordingly

none of the others I'm a member of, or have been a member of, require any advance notice at all (Modern Times, Sierra Nevada, Hangar 24)

I don't have much familiarity with working at a warehouse. But, like I said before, I can't think of any other business that requires this much notice. Maybe if I were picking up something at the Port Of Los Angeles that was coming off of a boat from Japan. Then I'd need to give notice.

I'm doing a lot of work on a house right now. Pick things up all the time from warehouses. Truckloads of tile, light fixtures, stone. from huge facilities. Everyone at these businesses seems to be able to accommodate their customers. I just picked up some stone from a gigantic stone yard in the middle of the desert. Probably over a mile of different rows of stone. Guy went out, got stone, came back. Got it

I had to pick up a mattress from a huge warehouse in the middle of nowhere recently. Went in with my invoice. Guy went in and got it. Left with mattress 5 min later