What the hell happened to Stone?

If it's still fresh in your market I think it's a very good modern wc ipa. Definitely has that Sierra Nevada dna, but it's like an updated torpedo to me

 

I'm also a fan of Dankful. To me it's like a slightly drier Torpedo with brighter hops. One of their best beers. But I'm a SN fanboy.

 

Should add that by your own admissions you don't know shit about IPAs or Sierra Nevada You are, however, a foremost expert on straight up and BA RIS and I know you can't say with a straight face that replacing Stone RIS with that hot garbage called Totalitarian makes any sense as a response to RIS not selling

 

I went in person to give them shit at the local Stone Taproom in Pasadena. They all agree on most things said on here as well but point it , most shit didn't sell at all

I will never forgive them for replacing IRS with that piss poor excuse of over hopped Totalitarian shit

 

I mean you prolly have other options for non BA imperial stouts in your neck of the woods ,but i dont. Old rasputin....and that's it. Narwhal is nowhere to be seen( big middle finger to SN for that)
Yes,Speedway is available but it has coffee, no biggie for me i buy it a lot, but IRS was a great straight up, no bullshit IRS.

I'm so glad that they decided to bring it back in October. I'm going to drown in it. Still though, i can't be mad at Stone. It's the people that don't buy it ultimately at fault ..
Im then led down a rabbit hole...why the fuck is old Rasputin and Speedway( both made well before or around IRS) still made??are they lying?

 

My impression is that it's a difference in perspective and goals (maybe informed by the revelation that Stone carries almost half a billion dollars in debt to them PE boys).

Northcoast seems completely content to stay the course, they don't seem to have any ambitions of growth. I have much less experience with AleSmith but they seem to be less fixated on growth than many other brewers. This attitude is likely to some extent a luxury of being established brands that likely really raked it in several decades ago when they were among among few options available to curious beer consumers.

The frustrating thing about Stone is that they seem like they should be able to be in that category. But it seems like they chose to pursue an aggressive growth strategy (that included pretty daring shots at the German/European and Chinese/east Asian markets) at precisely the wrong time.

Then they turn around and say, "we didn't have a choice! It's not what we wanted to do, we had to for business!". And maybe that's true, it just feels like an incomplete retelling when we can see some of their peers who made different choices seeming to have handled the market turbulence much better.

And again, I want to reiterate, the biggest problem (in my mind) isn't that they dropped beers that I enjoyed from their portfolio. It's that they changed their portfolio and started making shittier beers. Stone IPA is still a well respected beer, of course its lost market share since it went from having between 0 and 5 competitors in any given market to having between 10 and 200. But it's still a great example of the style. How have they not produced any other ipas that have achieved anything close to that level of renown?

Same with RIS (which, I swear was always RIS not IRS but I'm not gonna look it up), how has the market for big stouts exploded and Stone took that opportunity to go from one of the early well regarded producers of the style to having nothing to offer? They did a shitty job of managing a major market transition and they were never able to replace Mitch as brewmaster. It's not the consumers fault that their beer got worse and their aggressive growth strategy wasn't super well thought out/coincided with more dramatic changes to the market landscape than most people expected. They fucked up, they continue to fuck up, and beer nerds who are nostalgic for their past glory see the clusterfuck of forgettable brands they've become have a hard time understanding how reduced sales of their actually good beers could be worse than shit sales of their uninspiring and trendchasing shitty new beers.

 

@unlikelyspiderperson It was defintely IRS

 

Can't argue with the pics. Thanks for setting me straight

 

yeah and they always released it around tax day. That was the joke

 

I like Stone IPA. And I would classify myself as a craft beer enthusiast, going on 50 years, since Anchor appeared near my residence in San Diego. I also regularly homebrewed beer from the early 70s to the mid 80s.

 

your post sums up my point. Old guard craft beer drinkers still like stone ipa. I like stone ipa too and other stone beers. I also homebrew and have been doing it for like 10 Years. I was saying that craft beer community in general no longer seeks stone out. Of all my friends the guys into craft beer don’t drink stone much. While the guys that drink craft beer but aren’t enthusiast buy stone. Their is no hype on their new releases, enjoy by sits on shelf’s past their enjoy by date. While, I like stone ipa I can’t remember the last time I bought it. There are much better WC ipas available at the same price point.

stone is marginal these days. Perfect for when I am shopping at the grocery store and my options are minimal. If I go to a bottle shop one of the last breweries I am looking for is stone.

 

Something about legal reasons or someshit didn't let them name it RIS when they submitted the application to release it.
In defiance they named it IRS

Is what i heard

 

Another long-time craft drinker checking in to say I like Stone IPA a lot. Fresh on tap it is an excellent wc IPA. If it were widely available in 6 packs at reasonable prices like Torpedo, I would buy it regularly. But it isn't, so I don't.

 

I’m only gonna say one thing...

 

Side note: I think SN is the best deal in craft beer. Particularly high abv IPA’s.

 

barrel aged narwhal $20 enough said.

 

Willettized is $13 Flat a 4 pack and even though its not in 16oz format still blows Narwhal out the water ( pun intended) .

I can't wait to have IRS in October

I have 2016 Fyodor and Mikhail in my possession that i will be opening soon and there are for sure among the top 20 best BA stouts i have ever had and i DO NOT mind the 24oz bottles they're in.
All i hope for is that IRS is so well received that they decide to keep it,if it isn't we have no ons to blame but ourselves