Bootleggers Brewery New Location. . .

I was there yesterday. There were plenty of tables both under the cover of a roof and outside in the open air. A pint of KS was 7.50 with fills being $25. It's a nice spot which could use some finishing touches. One thing I would suggest they do is add umbrellas to the tables outside so your beer doesn't get light-struck.

 

I'm digging the additional hours: they're open everyday at 11am. Didn't get closing times, but I know they're open until 10 on the weekends.

 

That area is great overall party scene and restaurant wise. It'll be a great spot to hit before or after dinner! Can't wait!

 

Grand opening hoedown this Saturday. Rumors abound that theyre going to pull some tastiness out of the cellar.

But then, it was also originally rumored that the new tasting room would open last May...

 

Parking near there sucks, and something needs to be done about shade since it's open on the South and West sides and the sun is going to be brutal there in the summer. $25 for growler fills hit me after I left with two full growlers (The last two they were filling because they were running low). At $25 I'd rather spend the money on gas and go to Alpine and fill my growlers with better IPAs at half the cost.

 

Seeing as how they literally cannot make enough Knuckle Sandwich to satisfy the rabid demand, I can't blame them for not discounting the growlers prices to cost less than bottles. Retailers are also happy because they aren't being undercut by tasting room prices.

 

i agree everytime i have been to bootleggers i am shocked by there prices
all the other breweries i frequent are much cheaper for tasters and
$25 for a growler fill that is way too much should more like $15-17 if they cant make enough of the product
just don't sell growler fills but hiking the price up so high I would never fill a growler there for that price

 

How is that different from Alpine?

 

Alpine makes better beer and charges less i guess that is how it is different

 

Hey, if you want to spend $30 on gas to save $7 on a growler fill, go for it. Alpine does make some great IPAs, though I have drainpoured a couple hundred dollars of infected Alpine beer at this point and they take zero responsibility for the quality of their product. That is one of the key differences to me.

 

What? Unless they jacked up the prices this past weekend for the new place, the flights at Bootlegger's have always been dirt cheap. Not to mention they've always been very cool with letting people just get a taste of beers for free before buying a glass.

I'm not thrilled about Knuckle Sandwich growlers being $25 now, particularly considering what I used to pay when they first started brewing that beer a couple years back. But I don't blame them at all. And you know what's crazy...I can simply choose to not buy a growler fill.

 

Yeah, typically it's around $5 for five 2oz pours. Which to me was the best go-to there. Grab two flights and you've tasted the majority of what you wanted to on the board.

Sucks about the price. Is it true that it's across from the Fullerton Police department now? Cause hey, that's always grand.

 

Wine with that?

 

I lol'd at the justification they gave on Facebook. Spends twice as long in the fermentor and uses quality ingredients.

 

Wouldn't previous batches have spent just as long in the fermentor and used equivalent quality ingredients? If anything, I'd think with more brewing capacity, the effective cost to brew would have actually gone down, as they aren't disrupting the rest of their production as much. What did the previous fills cost?

 

I lol'd at a completely reasonable agreement as well! This same reason is also used by the Bruery (and plenty of others) for the high price of Bourbon Beers and Sours

I seem to remember it always being an $20+ growler to get. oh well

 

It's really a no brainer to just go with three bottles of it opposed to a growler. They're all over the place in large amounts.

 

Every other time I've gotten a growler fill of KS it's been $20 even. A $5 increase in price isn't a deal breaker (actually for me it somewhat is, since 3 bottles runs about the same price and doesn't require as heavy a commitment to a day of drinking). It is rather laughable that the price increase wasn't what was addressed, just a rather lame justification of said price.

I'd have no problems (and respect the company a lot more) if they had flat out stated that prices were increasing (at least for growler fills, which they have) in order to help offset the cost of moving, the lost revenue due to time spent moving, funding their expansion, an increase in the cost of quality ingredients. Instead, 4 weeks in the fermentor is more than twice as long as some of our beers, and it uses more ingredients.

Does it now need to ferment 25% longer? Does it now require 25% more ingredients?

Yeah, I lol'd.

(And four weeks in a fermentor is not the same as months in a barrel, especially when stored in an offsite facility with its own overhead. I can get behind breweries charging more for BA beer, just as I can get behind bootleggers charging more for a bomber/growler fill of KS over rustic rye. But a little transparency goes a long way).

 

I guess you should go to Alpine.