Highland Park Brewery thread

Yes, as I mentioned they're a little light on the Lazier Susan and BA HS but they always try to have the beers on tap on release day. I don't think they've failed on that part yet, but Ross was worried this time that they wouldn't.

And regarding the current argument about entitlement, I think for any brewery if there's a single bottle limit they shouldn't allow proxies. Cuz fuck your out of area entitlement. Turnabout is fair play. ;-)

 

Not every beer is gonna be a stone fruit aged sour. They need those proxies to sell out a lot of the beers. I know Bob will most likely adjust how he does things after this quick sell out, but outside of the stone fruit sours it is probably hard to predict which will be an instant sellout and which will not.

I actually proxy for quite a few people that all live in SoCal. They love HPB but with traffic going to HPB it's easily a 3hr round trip, so I pick up for them. I know I'm not the only one doing this.

 

Not agreeing or disagreeing with your overall point but it's not that much of a lottery; there are advantages that some might have over others. The advantages being having faster internet, good mouse skills, having a clock with the official NIST US time counting by the second/knowing when to refresh, and being prepared (logged in, understanding eventbrite/bpt layout, no distractions).

 

In college we used to go to a bar that had the White Album on the jukebox, and put in Revolution 9 over and over. The bar patrons did not find this amusing but we did

 

Ah, not sure about your first sentence there. But, yeah, in general I'm totally fine with proxies, but a beer with a single bottle limit is gonna sell out no problem. So I'd definitely definitely prefer no proxies on those, and that goes for all breweries.

 

My friends and I would put on El Sonidito on repeat at Tony's Darts Away, one bartender freaking loved it, everyone else freaking HATED it. Now it's no longer available there. hahahah

 

Not every* beer. Damn fast typing.

 

1. Neza is the shitttttt. Best Bartender in the Bar Tending game.
2. I was going to avoid the argument, but we in California are lucky that we have such a large majority of releases online. Besides the holdouts of Alpine, Russian River, and Beachwood, I can't think of any one else that hasn't switched over. Can you imagine the level of rage if Tree House sold Good Morning and allowed proxies to purchase online, same for Perennial and BA Abraxas, or Toppling Goliath KBBS or many others, but none of them do online releases. I'll take missing out on a release because the pool for purchasing was wider than just locals who could make it there within two weeks, than missing out, or shit even getting a release that took waiting in line. I value my time over beer. If I can get online when it goes on sale to attempt to get a bottle vs. playing the how early do I have to get there game, I'll take online 100% of the time. And I can't speak for Bob, but HPB is also growing in popularity real quick. Cherry ****z didn't even sell out first day and that shit was 800 bottles, limit 8 per person. 100 people could've maxed and it would've been gone. And Cherry ****z is still the best thing they have done, it's the second best cherry beer I've ever had, only behind LPK (and it's closer than you'd imagine, at least to me). It takes time to adjust to making sure you sell it all so you don't have extra inventory and keeping people happy. Bob to me is a guy who cares about local more than anything else, so if he decides allowing proxies is working against that he will adjust. I know it gets thrown around a lot these days, but it is just beer. Great beer that less exists than the amount of people want to try it, so there's no perfect way.

 

I wasn't sure how releases went as I usually don't make it out most of the time. That's why online releases with a reasonable pickup window work best for me. About the only good argument for allowing proxies is the unofficial distribution the beer gets, leading to more exposure. Of course that's a great win for the brewery, but they'd have to weigh that cost against alienating their local customer base that supports them year round.

 

I think the issue is, Bob might need to adjust for proxies based on sales after beerfriends. In a release with 700/300 bottle counts, if each beer friend buys their max allocation that leaves maybe 300/100 beers available to the public. In a case like that, I would agree with you 100% no proxies.

But I think it should be a case by case basis, which I'm not sure any brewery wants to deal with the logistics of that on each release.

 

I'm sure those factors have some kind of impact on the success rate, though I'm not sure if it's significant enough to give someone an unfair advantage over another.

 

HYPERTRADING!

 

^^Yes^^ My time is more valuable then beer...If I get shut out online from the comfort of my AC controlled office, so be it. If I get shutout in person after waiting in line on a hot day with a bunch of stinky, obnoxious beer geeks for 3 hours, AND I still get blanked, I will be thoroughly and justifiably pissed off...a beer named Parabajava may come to mind for some here. So do you want this? Or That?

 

I used to go to dive bars and pick the longest songs possible to get my monies worth, one time I put the live version of Iron Butterfly's Innagadadavida. Damn thing is nearly 30 minutes long.

 

Let's tell them butthurters that internet traffic is throttled in such a way where local ip's get access faster to the buy button

 

Even more confusing is that those who are all "WE SUPPORTED YOU AND YOU'RE GIVING US LOCALS THE FINGER!" are out of line and misguided.

First off, the whole beer friends thing is pretty much an indicator if you've consistently purchased bottles. Again, it's not based on maxing out, those who were asked were just folks who regularly buy bottles when released. That means the non-fruited stuff that didn't sell out in 20 minutes. So those "locals" who supported them, for the most part with the exception of a few here and there, got invited to beer friends as it has grown.

That in itself should be enough to be the back scratching return to those locals who they see as helping the brewery out.


It really bummed me out to stop by around 12:30 today for a pour of uncle rad and see bob sucked in to answering nasty emails and post about how it sold out so fast and how proxies are the worst - even though proxies have been allowed for HPB for as long as they have been selling beer. This one just had proxies limited to 2 per person, an attempt to make it more fair. And yet people are still salty about it.

Don't blame proxies. Blame the fact that it's just not a high yield of product to go around.

Locals can, and should stop by the Hermosillo on that weekend of bottle pick up. As history has shown they do tap it that Friday. If that is that they want to actually taste it and not just have bottles to potentially trade away.


Just sucks that something that should be a success for them, in having the name recognition and being good at their beer making game is being turned into a sort of curse because of the craft beer scene and butt hurt folks.

It was a special edition of an already special edition beer, folks. It was a given that it would go fast. The proxying I did in the past was for other locals who, because I'm there all the fucking time anyway, they just asked me to pick up their bottles. So it's not uncommon that other locals are getting their beer proxied as well.

Either way, Bob and the crew deserve a lot more than some entitlement that seems to be going around on this one for the quick sell out.

 

FT: Lazier Susan ghetto poured in the bathroom into a pop-cap Grolsch bottle
ISO: ∞

 

but only local IPs to eventbrite or wherever their connection is coming from. Somewhere in Norcal.