Bruery Hoarders Society

I just have beef. Sorry for being OT!

Yes, just beef. Yes, it's silly. Except to Ray Daniels.

I think it's silly, and I sure as hell wouldn't need a Cicerone certification to get a job in the industry. The only people being helped by the Cicerone program are a handful people in food service. And Ray Daniels.
If I truly wanted to get a job in the industry, I'd get a formal education, not a certificate from Ray.

I am so damn OT for this thread. I'm a bad troll!

 

I disagree 100% with what you say. habebe had a lot of the Bruery stuff and a lot of the Eclipse variants. I will take a BT over any Eclipse. Point being is that your quality vs. hype point is just your opinion. We all have our own opinions.

 

While I disagree with the substance of your position Paul, I've always thought the apples/oranges thing as a lazy cliche. There is no reason why you can't compare the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of different things. Lenny Leonard does it all the time:

"If you ask me, Muhammad Ali, . . . in his prime. . . was much better than anti-lock brakes."

For me, I prefer Bruery's futures setup. No rush to order. Guaranteed allocations. No crashing servers (well not for RS/HS anyways).

 

Like it or not, the industry is recognizing the program. Greg Koch stated that having it would definitely give you a leg up when they hire for several positions.
He posted that on the old forum.

-definitely off topic

 

I agree. In the end, as a consumer, we're provided with more options and that's always a good thing.

For those who lament the Bruery's profit/money making motives, I would search back through old threads and see all the complaining by those who didn't get a chance to buy Black Tuesday in 2010 and the inevitable "Why can't they just make more of_____ beer?" Assuming they reinvest the revenue back to the business, they now can make more X beer.

As with most beers, the "quality" is subjective and which is why there are a plethora of breweries out there that suits everyones needs. I don't think by making a blanket statement that "this whole thing is a joke" is particularly fair. For someone like myself who enjoys Bruery beers and also has no time to go chase down beers, HS/RS provides a very nice option. I like having options.

 

Curious if I'm the only one that's happy my pass didn't give me the "Privilege" on the Hoarder's site to buy?

Cuz at first I was all like "Hell Nahhh! Seven Hunndy?". - When it was first announced.

But then I was all like "Daaaamn, maybe I should. Cuz I do love me some beerz". - Trade bait.

But, then after waiting to make sure it was NOT a scam site, I tried and to my secret relief, ......Login Error. It was like getting a total shit hand in a 9 hand poker game. Easy to walk away from with no guilt or regrets.

But seriously, WTF!?! Am I really not good enough!?!

 

Hi All--

Interesting read, good to read all of the opinions on the Hoarders Society. I appreciate all of the feedback.

I've been wanting to create several levels of "Society" memberships for awhile now as we have a wide range of customers with varying expectations-- those who have extensive beer collections and trade frequently, others who want a a wide variety in smaller quantities of what we have to offer, and customers that fall somewhere in the middle. I'd love to be able to deliver a great experience to a wide range of beer enthusiasts, and I don't think the best way to do that is exclusively through the Reserve Society. There are certainly all three types of customers in Reserve Society now, and I know we can do better to serve the particular desires of a wide range of customers.

We could not figure out a good way to do this with the available "off the shelf" eCommerce solutions out there, and up to this point having a customized solution that takes a web development company several months to develop and continual maintenance and improvements is outside of our reach financially as a small, growing company. Up to now, we've been investing in our capacity, improving our production processes, implementing and improving our retail efforts, and in our staff at the brewery, Tasting Room & Provisions (now totaling close to 60 employees). Improving business systems and processes has been "higher hanging fruit", but at this point it is very important in the process of becoming the brewery we want to be. We finally have the resources to invest in this, so have so we've enlisted a local OC eCommerce development company to put together a solution that makes this possible. I'm very excited about this. We are tailoring the site and the backend processes to make a much more pleasant experience for our members and allow us to do a better job at serving our members. Even Black Tuesday next year (and perhaps this year, if we can get it going in time) will run much smoother with greater server reliability and hopefully we'll avoid all of the issues in past years. This is a sizable investment, but I know it's what we need to do.

The Hoarders Society is a way to recognize and cater to our most loyal Reserve Society members, and allows us to brew and sell beers that we wouldn't otherwise be feasible to make by taking manageable risks with some very expensive ingredients / processes. The 5 exclusive releases included with the membership are very expensive to brew (especially two of them in particular), and at this point we'd have to take big gambles to create enough for the entire Reserve Society. The price we'd have to offer these beers would be well beyond our current top pricing, and frankly I'm not comfortable releasing beers that exceed our current price range. By securing an up front commitment and an established price for these beers, this is the best way to be able to make these beers make sense financially for us and hopefully make sense for many of those invited to join the Hoarders Society. Once we reach our target goal for Hoarders Society, we will not be growing it or adding a membership above and beyond it. Reserve Society is very near to the memberships we'd like as well-- we intend to grow it at a much slower pace than we have in the past.

Everyone who is invited will get a card via "snail mail". We thought this would be fun and more personal, but given the timing of US Mail, perhaps this wasn't the best idea. There are about 5 invitees who may not be able to log in for some technical reason (my fault), so if you get a card and can't log in, please contact [email protected].

I am fully responsible for the name, and I'll take the heat from that! As a beer collector / fellow "hoarder", I thought most of you would appreciate it. Similar to beer geek / beer nerd / etc., I think hoarder aptly describes the collecting nature of many of us. I apologize to those who think it is in bad taste, or think that I'm laughing at you. Trust me, I'm not.

Unfortunately we had to have a method of selecting who would receive an invite, and that leaves many of our great customers out. Alienating great customers is our biggest concern in doing this, and certainly what I take most to heart in reading the comments. On the bright side, the Reserve Society will be much improved over previous years, and Reserve Society members will have opportunities at events for to try the beers we're offering to the Hoarders Society. I'd like to emphasize that we are committed to providing the best experience to both our Reserve Society and Hoarders Society, and we will constantly strive to improve upon both. Given how much focus and work we are putting into our special releases, 2013 will be a better time to be a Reserve Society member than any year prior.

We're still a very young brewery that is rapidly growing, and we are not perfect and we absolutely make mistakes. Our goal is to make everyone we encounter very satisfied, and while we acknowledge this is an unobtainable goal, we still strive to do this. Announcing these types of changes certainly do elicit some negative responses, and we are listening and learning from everyone who has posted. We also recognize that we can't make everyone happy, regardless of the decisions we make.

I recognize that Hoarders Society is significant amount of money. Is it too much? For many, yes. I'll be curious what the majority of Hoarders Society members say a year from now, but my inclination is they'll be very happy they are a part of it. There will be some pleasant surprises throughout the year that will add value to the membership, but we've calculated the membership cost to be the exactly the retail cost of all of the beer and merch we listed as included in the membership. Overall, I believe it to be a great value, even though the initial price is difficult to swallow.

I want to recognize every Reserve Society member for greatly helping The Bruery to get where we are. Your support has been pivotal in being able to expand our brewery, barrel aging efforts, and overall becoming the brewery we want to be in the short 4+ years of our existence. I never imagined The Bruery growing to where it is, and I am grateful every day to be doing what I'm doing. Our many expansions have been greatly assisted by your membership and support, and future resources will continue to go into improving what we do and how we provide it to you. Our members support and satisfaction is extremely important to us. I will work tirelessly to be the Bruery I dream about and be the Bruery you want us to be.

Sorry for writing a novel here, and thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Patrick
The Bruery

 

Great post, Patrick! I'm going to guess that the winery collabs are the REAL expensive ones...

 

That's not the same thing. Those things are available to everyone that can afford it. With this, people have to be invited.

I think it's a cool idea to have different levels of membership, but the invite side of it seems like it could cause some dissatisfied customers that feel they deserve it based on how much they spend this year (which clearly has little to do with it, since I have no maxed out on a single allocation or come close, really. I have been a member for more than just this year though and am more active than most on the RS Forum site).

 

"I could get a good look at a T-Bone by sticking my head up a butcher's ass"

 

I am looking at the way 50/50 does there futures program vs the way the Bruery does their futures program. 50/50 gives a 30% discount on Eclipse when you pre-order, the Bruery keeps the same price whether you pre-order Black Tuesday or not (the only discount to the price of Black Tuesday is when you're a society member, but not everyone is a society member) Eclipse is $20 a bottle when you pre order versus $30 pre order, and then there is no difference when bought retail at the Bruery. Yes, Eclipse retail is $27-30 a bottle, but that is because it goes through distributors and retailers, so the price goes up because they have to make money too.

 

The Bruery guys must be reading this and shitting themselves right about now. All of this whining over a new exclusive beer club? They know their crowd too well; I'll bet there'll be more RS members than ever next year with all this talk and the Rues will be laughing all the way to the bank. But they'll also be able to make more insane new beers and push the boundaries even further, so it's a win for everyone.

 

wat

black tuesday preorder: $25.50, retail: $30
eclipse preorder: $24 (last year) / retail: $30 (last year)

similar price and futures structure. eclipse is the very definition of a gimmick and it clearly has a high profit margin - both criticisms you leveled at the bruery. i don't think you're prepared to argue this coherently.

the only significant difference is that you don't like the bruery. and yes, taste is subjective, but i don't think fiftyfifty is anywhere near quality. they've got one famous beer and they can't even get that to be consistent. plus, have you had concentrated evil? it tastes like its name.

 

again man, i think your missing the point... I have a lot of these beers or elect to not have more (being the case with otiose) I got to taste white chocolate, liked it, bought more when they made it available. I love M3 and at least I know not to allocate too much of it as there's another on the way. But the thing is I'm not trying to collect, and one more of these beers I just got isn't helping that. Stoked on the 11 RS only releases. They sound good. Id personally rather nothing at signup and 3 of those with membership.

 

Lulz at people who buy Bruery beer let alone spend thousands of dollars. You guys are suckers.

 

This could potentially be worth the cost of certification right there though. If you had two identically qualified applicants, with the only different that one took the time to obtain Cicerone status, I'd imagine employers in the beer industry would go with the Cicerone, all things being equal. Especially since the restaurant/bar/brewery could then advertise to the public as having a "specially certified beer Cicerone" on staff.

 

Although I am not disagreeing with ou regarding the winery collabs, but I have heard that the coffee they are using in some of the coffee enhanced beers is close to $120.00 a pound.

 

And to further make Levitation's point, Bruery bottlings are 750ml. 50/50's are 22oz. That's like, 4 more ounces man!!!

 

$120 a pound!?!!?! Damn. Grapes are a lot cheaper than that.

 

Yeah, but what about Johnny Mathis versus Diet Pepsi?