Goose Island Bourbon County 2017

There is a podcast where Jared discusses this whole thing in depth. What they knew, what they tested, what they learned, etc. It's a bit slow, but aimed at the folks who really want to know more and have followed the debacle closely. Might be worth a listen.

http://goodbeerhunting.com/gbh-podcast/2016/5/13/hype-002-jared

 

Very helpful. I plan to listen to this after I finish here at the gym while eating dinner.

 

i heard the podcast when it dropped. i also recall a lot of people pointed out GBH use to accept $$$ directly from GI but never mind that.

sticking with your assertion that 2016 BCBW saw 8 months of age in the new 2nd use barrel format.... can we ask why GI was still trying to pass the bogus conclusion a tanker truck was responsible... when that had to be months after GI knew,,, GI had to throw out all the BCBS barrels? GI knew the issue was widespread barrel contamination. yet GI continued to look for alternative excuses to offer the audience. they could have and should have handled it better.

 

Your last part what has been said before. I think it is fairly undisputed.

Not trying to be a dick, but I think that's actually pretty far away from what was being discussed.

 

do you mean what was discussed in the podcast?

 

I have not listened to the podcast. I am just referring to anything surrounding the "how the infection was handled" part. That's been discussed ad nauseum.

 

If the infection hits, it must be s**t.

 

Sorry guys! I didn't mean to stir this up again. I just wanted to see if you all thought that 2017 BCBBW was better than 2016.

 

Visiting FL this week. Dropped by a few stores. Very surprised to see cases of BCBS still stacked sitting around. Also a bunch of CBS still sitting available. This doesn't happen in IN.

 

Another shipment has landed in Washington State (February 2018). Yea, I think we can all admit BCBS is no longer worthy of sitting around on Black Friday to grab a few artificial "limited bottles".

 

In many markets it only lasts hours, while in others it sits in piles for months. I expect the reason new shipments are popping up is that places with piles of it are sending it back to the distributors who then find another place for it. You would hope that they shape distribution based on the previous year's demand, but I doubt it. BCBS seems to be fading in popularity, between the infection, the price, and the competition. Perhaps they should reduce BCBS production, and ramp up production of the variants.

 

I don’t think anyone is sending it back to the distributors and then finding another place for it. I think there is simply so much that they can do multiple shipments like this. Although I’d be interested in knowing if anyone in those places where BCBS sat on shelves found that it suddenly disappeared. I’m not so sure it has faded in popularity so much as the production is just huge now.

But, I agree with you 100% on reducing regular BCBS production and upping the variants. That would even things out a lot.

 

All they have to do is release another VR

 

this seems so glaringly obvious yet it hasn't happened.

more peculiar since we've learned coffee variant is barrel aged BCBS with cold pressed added after barrel aging is complete. prior to that tidbit being introduced, my assumption was the likely reason Coffee variant remained so limited is because they were properly screening barrels that contained actual coffee & having to toss barrel segments that weren't passable. but that logic doesn't hold up if there's no such thing as barrels containing coffee to begin with.

if there's tons of successfully aged BCBS (sitting on floors/shelves) & one just needed to add cold pressed to flip it to the coffee variant - why isn't there plenty of both or significantly less disparity between the releases of both? meantime, there remain suggestions GI is still having to discard a lot of "coffee variant" which is leading to limited amounts released for sale. even with pasteurization taking place??

something seems amiss. assuming any of these "suggestions" are accurate - why would they have to discard "coffee" when the discards ideally take place during weeding out what (BCBS) barrels pass to be emptied, blended & bottled vs what barrels don't pass muster? said process should be taking place before a "coffee variant" actually exists; if in fact the coffee component is added post-barrel. things that make you go hmmm...

 

My theory, and I really have no proof for it, is that the coffee BCBS base is different than the standard BCBS. They have a different formula.

But, this is only a theory, or guess on my part.

 

I thought it was already well-established that scarcity drives up rati...er, makes beer taste better. The obvious answer is that GI is limiting supply to maintain BCBCS's prestige and charge a premium for it.

But the good part about this info is that, as long as you've got some regular BCBS, you can make your own BCBCS at home. Plus, you can experiment with different beans to see what really tickles your fancy in a coffee stout.

 

How so? You even mention in some markets it sells out in hours so it seems as you also mentioned it's a matter of fixing the distribution to better align demand with supply across markets.

 

let us assume this is correct. just me, but that's borderline calling them unsavvy on two fronts.

1. unsold BCBS is not their intention. mitigating some unsold BCBS by flipping it to scarcer coffee variant makes good business sense. to me, BCBS sitting untouched is not good business sense.
2. second fold since they've moved away from the narrative to encourage self aging & stopped suggesting the bottled contents will "Develop for 5 years"... it reiterates their disinterest in shit sitting around either in y/our possession or stores/ distributors keep from failure to sell product rapidly. in lieu of the recent 2015 debacle, and the loss of an entire 2017 variant, i'd like to think or hope they're past playing around with false scarcity models.

don't get me wrong. i'm not saying they can't or didn't. i am saying i wouldn't & doing so seems dumb at this stage of the game. jmho.

 

Seems like there is more mention of it stacking up than in the past. If that's true, then production is up, demand is off, or both. Time will tell. So yeah, if they can fix it by adjusting distribution, then great. Otherwise a shift towards variants might help. I recently had a CBS, a BCBS, and a BA Surly Darkness. The BA Darkness came out better IMHO. I still like BCBS, it's just not at the top of my list anymore.

 

I wouldn't really be concerned about oversupply until we see this stuff sitting on the floor into Aug/Sep/Oct, in which case that would seem to dampen enthusiasm for the Black Friday release. Having it readily available through the winter, while not what we've grown used to, still seems like a win for the consumer.