Hard to get beer stories

Get ready for a wall of text. I have two stories and one is a doozy.

Last summer I was changing duty stations from San Diego to Rhode Island. You have an option to either fly or drive and seeing as I have a car that is reliable but old enough that I don't car how many miles I put on my car. So I decide to drive it. We create this awesome plan with pit stops visiting family we haven't seen in a while and visiting awesome breweries on the way. We hit Firestone Walker, Fig Mountain, Crooked Stave, and Great Divide. The trip has been a beer dream. Then we hit Chicago. Chicago itself was a beautiful vibrant city with a beer scene to match. It's awesome. My friend who lives in Chicago doesn't have a car and is dying to get out of the city so I offer up New Glarus as it's a 2-2 1/2 hour drive. Everyone is on board. So we make the trek. Highway up there is a mess. Construction forever and a 4 lane highway is condensed to 2 that is gridlocked with Tractor-Trailers. Brutal. Finally we hit the Wisconsin line and these huge dark clouds are looming over head. It start to pour. I'm about a mile from my exit when my dashboard lights up like a pinball table and my car starts stalling bad. I have no idea what is happening as my every light is blaring. I pull over to the shoulder and shut the car off for 30 seconds. I turn the key again and it starts just fine. I think something must have shaken loose and I'll check it in the next town. Another 10 minutes down some back country road with no town in sight. Stalls again. Fuck. I just have to make it to the next town. 10 minutes down the roads stalls again. Damn. This happens 2 more times. I say screw it jump out in the now moderate rain and check the car. Nothing seems wet. The motor sounds fine. Weird. 10 more minutes down the road and it dies hard this time. Then to make matters worse my stomach starts telling me its time to go. So there I am 100 feet away from my car on a back country road in middle of no where Wisconsin in the pouring rain shitting my brains out on some poor farmers field with my poor wife and friend sitting in the car. At this point I'm tallying all the terrible things I've done in my life and coming to terms that this is my punishment. I come back into the car and newly determined (soaking wet) man. I start the car and it's struggling so I slam on the gas and a white puff of smoke shoots out the back and it starts running. New Glarus or bust. The car makes it. The whole time I'm thinking New Glarus is big enough for a world class brewery it's got to be have an auto shop. Nope! Great. Well I figure we made it here so might as well enjoy what we came here for and hopefully letting the car rest and dry out will help it out for the long trek home or we are spending the night in New Glarus. After some amazing beer and a trip to their bottle shop for a load up we get back to the car. The moment of truth. The car starts and we make a very long very nerve racking trip back to Chicago. Some how my wife is still with me and my friend is still a close friend. Now I let the beer come to me through distro.

Also, I walked into Hamiltons randomly when they still had PtY on tap. I waited at the bar for roughly 30 seconds as the bar tender poured and it cost me $9. Damn i love that bar.

 

after several months straight of whale searching i've pretty much given up on the chase, if the shop i'm in has something awesome thats reasonably priced, great, if not, then i'll probably pick up a couple of sixers from SN, or Sixpoint, DFH, ETC.

 

This year's Chillwave was comical if nothing else. Every time I stopped at my local spots to load up the fridge they always seemed to be out of chillwave. These are places that are 98% craft and lots of it. One day I'm picking up my "honey get this on your way home from work" stuff at Giant Eagle and low and behold a giant stack out of Chillwave. I laughed and got a few packs.

 

I've waited in line for a couple hours for KBS. 3.5 hours for Cantillon. The most extreme besides that is DLD. My friends and I do a conference call (we don't want too many tickets [yes that's actually happened]) starting maybe 15 minutes before the tickets go on sale. I take of the afternoon from work (I've been able to access the ticket site from work every year, so I just do it there and then go back to work even though I requested it off, gotta save that PTO). The conference call has also saved us before. 2014 the queue started before the tickets actually went on sale. One of the group hit refresh and told us all to do the same immediately. The conference call also makes the ~30 minute ticket buying experience more enjoyable. Then we got the drive from Cinci up there for the weekend. Luckily a friend has family about an hour away from Munster, so we just stay there and make the last leg Saturday morning. That's my most extreme beer chase, and honestly, I would have done it the first year for DL, but after that (fourth year going), it was really for the fest. The bottle sharing, and just the atmosphere, is a lot of fun. Depending on how this year goes (GA tickets made tap lines way too long for anyone that has a group in the middle of the day), we were discussing this possibly being our last year even trying to get tickets.

 

Once again, it then becomes the adage that there's no way to make everyone happy all of the time.
The thing about these (most of the...) limited releases is that they are LIMITED. Small batch. 500, 750, 1000 bottles. There just isn't enough to send to distribution in any meaningful amounts. For a lot of these brewers, that would mean maybe 1 bottle per account. For other brewers, they don't distribute at all, or just draft (which would bring it's own set of challenges)
I went up to Maine a couple weeks ago to Tributary for the Mott The Lesser (recipe formerly known as Kate the Great from Portsmouth) release. There was about 1500 bottles released, plus a couple kegs. Even if they did distribute, how would they (or the distributor) decide what store gets an allotment?
For Dinner, there was what, 750 cases made? Ditto question, considering they distro to Maine, Massachusetts and how many other states? That would be probably less than 1 case per store, and then becomes how does the store allot it out, 1 bottle per person? By Lottery? Throw it on the shelf for 1 selfish (or opportunistic, depending on your point of view) to buy it all?

 

No interest. I go buy beer at the store and go home.