Toppling Goliath Brewery appreciation thread...

Congrats to those that got tickets!!...I am still a bit butthurt over the whole thing....couldn't have tried any harder.....I just didn't have an hour+ to devote to the F5 button(or I just didn't hit it enough)......well, here's to hoping my luck is better with the Black Gold lottery....

 

You shouldn't have issues. Reach out to us Midwest BAs and we can help out. Fly to Minneapolis and catch a ride with someone.

 

Congrats to all as well. An hour may or may not have helped. I refreshed every few seconds for a couple hours. Plus kept my phone at my hip ever since the 'soon' tweet. Kinda sad but after getting shut out last year as well, I'd really like to try the darn beer. Bummd about not getting picked but not mad. Like lots of folks though.... Disappointed in how TG decided to run the thing.

 

Des Moines is another option. About 3.5 hour trip.

 

The brewery didn't run the ticket site. They chose poorly. That doesn't mean they are a poorly run brewery, not run by professionals.
Sure seems like you do have a problem not getting tickets.
Pretty sure everyone got to the same point as you and had the site crash.
Pretty sure they know it isn't the best they can come up with, but that's what they chose. Next time, they'll do it differently and piss off a whole new crowd that didn't get tickets.
Of course, those people will also say "I don't have a problem not getting any tickets." and them completely rip the brewery.

 

Exactly. No matter how they do it - when you have 500 tickets to an event that tens of thousands of people want to go to there are going to be pissed off people. If they do it silent everyone but locals is pissed. If they announce it ahead of time locals are pissed that it wasn't silent. There's no winning. They just need to release the tickets whatever way is easiest for them and leave it at that, which they did.

I really don't think it helped that people used multiple devices per person. I saw one guy post that he had 8 computers/tablets/phones refreshing the whole time. If everyone averaged 2 devices that doubled the load on the servers, no wonder it crashed. I tried on my phone and wasn't getting anywhere then loaded up my mac and it was taking a minute or two to load pages whereas my phone wasn't loading them at all. Pick a device and go with it next time, seems to be the lesson.

 

TG pissed off hundreds or thousands of actual, loyal customers in favor of whale hunters. This isn't a hard concept to grasp. That was a conscious choice by Clark and it rubbed people the wrong way who buy their products at retail and remain consistently engaged with their social media efforts.

 

Good thing I'll be able to trade for this. I never want to be that stressed out over beer lol. I thought people freaked out over Jester King releases a lot here in Texas but that's nothing to what I saw yesterday.

I understand Mornin Delight is super rare and probably really good, but people being butthurt over not getting tickets need to reprioritize things. Especially when there is tons of amazing brews out there.

 

Yes, it sucked but complaining is not going to get any of us unlucky souls tickets. I would love to have the try to try MD, but I'm just going to have to wait like everyone else. I see a lot of people saying why no lottery? Yes, this would be the fairest option and remove any extraneous variable, but this could also remove a lot of the hype around the release. The scramble to get a ticket is what they want people doing. Does it piss people off? Yeah, but 95% of those people are going to try again the next time bc they have failed yet again at getting a chance to try it, and as the brand grows this number goes up. Maybe someday they'll do a lottery, but right now these methods bring a lot of hype and excitement. Again, yes this one was rather screwy and they could have made a better choice but everyone was still in the same position for the most part.

 

Will preface this by saying this is coming from someone who got through and was able to finally purchase tickets.

Some free advice for TG. A release like this can be handled in a couple of different ways. You can do a silent release so the people who support your brewery the most have a shot getting them. You can release to Mug Club only which again is giving the people who support your brewery the best shot at getting them. You can do a lottery system whereas it's random who you reward.

What you can't do is use a third party ticketing system that is notorious for crashing during ticketed beer releases and then act like it's not your fault. This is your industry, you need to research beforehand how events like yours were handled by the company you are hiring to handle your event.

If you lose a lottery you're a little disappointed but that's life, when you lose a first to 500 during heavy server loads and constant crashing you're pissed off because EVERYONE had tickets in their cart at some point, so everyone feels cheated. It was still basically a lottery, but you needed to have luck AND time to sit around smashing refresh.

In the end it's just another small thing that you're doing to annoy your most fervent fans. The small things add up.

 

I agree that name calling and such isn't productive (although I felt like it and may have done so in the moment) but to use your own points.... TG made a poor decision, knew they could have done better but chose to do it anyway. That doesn't scream well run or best interest of our customer but, they're a business. Their best interest is what should come first. No sarcasm intended. I will say that the overwhelming majority of pissed off people I've seen are upset with the way they ran the release and the failure to even hint at 'we should have done better' not just angry about not getting a beer (although those entitled folks are probably out there). I've tried twice and gotten shut out twice but I'll try next time as well, just hope they come up with a better idea than BPT.

 

All of these sites crash during these events. Which sites haven't gone down? Didn't Lost Abbey try 3 separate sites for theirs? The email thing was good last year, but they didn't do that again because they spent a bunch of hours sifting through emails and deleting duplicates and emailing the winners. I'm sure it was a lot to manage. With this way they just give BPT the info, have the winners pay the fees for them, and collect their $50,000 CASH on October 8th. From a business standpoint this was done absolutely perfectly. None of the people complaining are going to stop buying fresh IPA or visiting the taproom, there is literally no downside for the brewery whatsoever.

 

All the people complaining will be back in line for the next one and everyone knows it.

 

IMO what shows TG is absolutely clueless about the ticketing system is the fact a lot of people got their tickets after @theTGBNews tweeted out tickets were "sold out". The site was showing Sold Out almost immediately, it wasn't until people stopped bombarding the site things opened up a bit.

 

You sneaky dog! Always with the 3L Prairie beers!

 

Hard to say what happened, but I would assume, the system said it was sold out, so they tweeted the update. I can't blame them for the technology giving them a false status. The same things happens with all releases (I tried to get yeezy shoes). People get them locked in their carts for 15 minutes. They can't finish the transaction as people are bombarding the site.
Then their product is release and the process continues until it is finally sold out. Ideally, the ticketing company can say, 500 have been confirmed, not just added to a cart.

 

Or they knew this exactly and wanted to take some pressure off the site.

 

The tweet was "Appears the tickets have sold out" which is slightly different imo. It seems they were going by what the BPT page reflected at the time.

 

It was a frustrating process to try for tickets (I didn't get any), but never found myself angry at TG. I don't know that there is a good option when a huge amount of people want to get 500 tickets - it's just a bottleneck that will be a pain to deal with no matter what method. This was easiest for them (or at least it sounds like it was), and it really did give just about everyone a fair shot at them. That "shot" may have involved a lot of pain on our end, but I ultimately feel like nobody got preference over others, so c'est la vie at that point.

On the plus side, I've saved $100, plus the cost of driving to Decorah, staying in Decorah and downing beers at the brewery, plus any other $$ I would spend on other bottles potentially being for sale that day. And I'll get to spend more time with my family and not catch any flak for being away (unless I get selected in the Black Gold lottery ).

 

I really don't understand why they don't just announce a bottle count limit and release a certain amount each day. JK started doing that this year with great results.