Side Project (2018)

anyone try Bruin yet? or nobody cares cuz a Derivation was released..

 

It would still be ridiculous. I’m not one that just wholesale supports every single thing my favorite brewer does. It’s ok to be critical of certain things when it’s warranted.

Also, right or wrong, to me, SP is all about trying to hype their beers as much as possible. Its just beer though. And there’s a ton of great beer out there that doesn’t require me to put up with all the bs to enjoy.

 

I thought it was nice. Interesting to taste the base for Balaton before it gets its cherries. It was real foam happy, bubbling out of the bottle as we sat there. Heavy funk. I got an almost blue cheese note on the finish. I thought it was pretty unique and definitely worth a try, especially at the price point.

 

looking forward to trying it this weekend!

 

I actually think the super, secret club is very pretentious to be honest. Every other brewery membership has allowed “outsiders” to join. And it’s actually fuckin hilarious to see how many bottles have been sold per “proxy” in Razzles against the “rules”.

And to clear up the “gifted” comment…Cory sold, hand numbered, and made a special box for a beer he named after his namesake. To me, that’s a gift I would drink and never think of trading/selling. I’ve similarly received über whale bottles from close friends that I would never think of trading/selling. Instead, I drank them with family/close friends as intended.

I think what pisses people off the most is some members have come off as is “WE” have the “right” to these über whalez that no one else can drink but a shit ton of these bottles show up on the trade block for profit and/or sold for profit and yet there is no “public” release for even locals???

I don’t think it’s the fact the membership exists, it’s the pompous nature of this “club” that rubs people the wrong way. @coryking your beer is amazing and very accessible to locals so thank you, I personally appreciate that.

That is all I will waste my time on the subject because I will never be “cool” enough for this club and I will continue to buy beer that is delicious (ie SP, etc)

 

@odcardinal I agree 100%. It's literally the "cool kids club" of beer. As someone who spends thousands of $$ at side project I could go on, but I don't think I have anything to add that hasn't already been said so I'll leave it at that.

 

D10 does not seem to be getting the love at the Chicago event that everyone here has exclaimed. Curious if this is a jets vs sharks thing where locals virtually always rate local options higher than out of towners, or if others seem to feel D10 is not as solid as some of the other blends.

 

I thought D10 was great, but it’s a step below D5 for a direct comparison. Not as good as D9 either. That’s all I’ve had so can’t speak to any of the other blends.

 

Care to be more specific?

 

D5 seemed thicker even though they are supposed to be the same recipe. It was also coffee forward with the vanilla as a strong complement as opposed to D10 where I got more of a coffee/caramel/chocolate thing with less vanilla. I also love rum barrels and D5 seemed more rum forward than D10

 

No one has mentioned the bottling of BBT2 on Instagram.

 

What’s to mention? Same release this year and next year and the year after that...

 

Its been a while since I've logged into BA, so quite a few things to answer, so here goes:

@Sabtos - have we met, cause damn, you're salty! I'm confused by your comments that I lie or whatever?

La Coterie - yes, we have a club. I'll say it again - we did La Coterie this first year with friends, family, and "trusted" regulars to work out kinks. Obviously, people will be people and we have kicked several out due to breaking our rules, but other than that, things have been going great, our members have been giving us feedback and we will be able to grow it in the future. I would rather have people upset with us that have never set foot in Side Project, then create a 1000 member club and have it go up in flames the first year because we screwed it up (we all know that this has happened to other breweries). We are still tiny - we have a limited staff - so this was the best way for us to roll this out. Hope you can patiently understand this.

Trading vs. Selling - @HawksBeerFan says it best in their post above. I'm going to show my age here, but back in my day, trading was not like it is now. We traded $ for $ and made relationships with people in parts of the country that had access to beers we wanted. Today's trading is more like selling - $ for $ is now based off of secondary prices from my understanding, which are based off of sold beers. No matter what, I will never stop the selling of our beers, but I will at least try. People that blatantly break our rules will not be given easy access to our beers (La Coterie memberships), but it's still going to happen. It does suck to make a special beer, have people that you trust receive it, then turn it around and sell it for 50 times what they bought it for.

Someone mentioned that we created these problems for ourselves. That also confuses me? How and why? Because I chose to stay small? Because I don't want 100 employees, millions of dollars of debt and a huge building? I started Side Project as the only employee and sometimes I miss those days. It was easier and harder. We now have the greatest staff that we could ever ask for and we are making almost 1000 barrels of beer a year, but I don't really want to get much larger - I'm comfortable here, I'm still happy, and I still love going to the work everyday. I don't want to take that away from myself by growing larger or faster than we need to. Call that intentionally limiting supply or whatever you want, its called the rest of my professional career and being happy.

Hype vs. Marketing. I still get crazy excited when we are blending beers, brewing something new, writing new recipes, discovering new flavors. I like sharing that excitement with our followers on instagram and twitter. If my excitement comes off as hype, be prepared for a lot more of it for years to come . Before I was a professional brewer, I loved following brewers (not breweries) on social media. I loved seeing them rack beers to barrels, take pictures from the brewhouse, hanging with other brewers - so I took that to heart when Karen and I started Side Project and tried to share those experiences - not the generic "new seasonal mixed pack case" from ABCD brewery social media post by some intern... Also, we get so, so, so, so many questions about our beers at both of our tasting rooms because, you all here are more in the know when it comes to sour/wild/funk beers, but 99.99% of people are not, so we make blog posts that we can direct people to for better understanding of what we do and who we are. Would you rather me write up blog posts and let you know whats coming up via our social media accounts, or just be silent, pretend our beers are super secret, and never tell anyone any details about the beers? I don't get it?

To - go vs. On - site. Karen and I still visit other breweries almost weekly. I rarely buy beer from the stores, I buy it from the sources. When we travel, we go to breweries. We love to visit places that were created by other small breweries, other likeminded people. When we visit other breweries, its always nice to see something special available, something that I can't get anywhere else, something that's a little exciting. So, that's what we do at our places. I feel like you all can see that? If we sold Derivation to-go, it wouldn't last the day, but if we make it on-site only, you might have (like in the case of D10) a window of a couple of weeks to join us. Also, paying $50 for a bottle on-site is better than losing razzles to some profiteer or worse yet, better than just straight up paying 2 or 3 times the price online (illegally I might add). Can't you see why we do a lot of on-site bottles?

Will we ever have a public Derivation release again - hopefully one day, but I can guarantee it will probably just make more people mad than happy. For those of you who have never been to our place, we are located in Maplewood and they wouldn't take kindly to camping, so the announcement would be very short notice, go to mostly locals, and then we would be right back here. Can we just agree that there is no way to make everyone happy? At least we try to change things up, please as many as possible and we actually read and address your comments. I wish I could make more BA Imperial Stouts, I really do and we have been, but you all know that it won't be enough. So just come by the brewery sometime, sit down, share a bottle with a neighbor, and hopefully enjoy it...

As for everyone that has been part of this 68 page run on Side Project, holy crap, thank you. It's still weird having people talk about us online, I will never get completely used to that. Hopefully we are doing more right than wrong, hopefully our beers are getting better (in my opinion they are, but we live or die on the happiness of our supporters/fans/customers) with every passing year, and hopefully next time you are by one of our places we have something fun and/or exciting available for you on-site and maybe even to-go. I am sorry that I haven't been on here in a while to catch up, but please feel free to fire anything my way and I will try to get back on here more often. A 22 and 3 month old have kept things pretty crazy around here lately .

Cheers,
Cory King

 

The jealously in this thread is thick, you can feel it.

 

Non club members are jealous of peple who get Oude Fermier, OWK, D10, & FdF?


In other news, water is wet.

 

Everyone wants to be a member. Course. Isn't that obvious?

That doesn't explain (nor did Cory) why he allows trading but not selling of his member beers when people can just as easily sell those bottles you traded for. -When, as he stated in his post, people don't trade like they used to. -He can't stop it completely, but him approving of trading has obviously vastly increased the number of member bottles for trade, especially D10. Just prior to this there were 2 or 3 different OWK trade posts/razzles that I had seen as well, which I suspect all correlated to something that transpired where it became obvious he's cool with trading.

I mean, he doesn't have to approve. He can also threaten to ban people for trading just like for selling. He could also (with keeping the membership small) require people to visit in a 45 day time span and drink the bottle on site. That would remove the need to come in when people are going crazy, and still allow the members to get the beer. Isn't that the point? If you don't come in during that time frame, since you didn't pay for it ex ante it just becomes part of the SP stout bottles that become available at events like stout week, zwanze, etc.

Would people complain? Sure, but it's your membership. Who would really complain to Cory once in his membership anyway? Not like you're worried about scaring them away.

Honestly, I greatly appreciate Cory coming and posting. I'm not butt hurt, and I'm not mad, and I don't think Cory should have to explain himself to us. That said, doesn't mean I understand some of his decisions, nor do i feel like they always "makes sense" with some of his other comments.

 

@coryking Thanks for weighing in here and investing so much TLC into each beer you produce. It really shines through and keeps this hobby fun and exciting.

 

Sorry, if I wasn't clear, that was a long post and maybe I missed some things.

I approve of trading because trading is how I first tasted (this is years ago) the RR sours, its how I tried KtG, BASS, DL, my first HF beers, vintage Lambic, and all sorts of other beers that made me a better brewer because of the palate education that they provided. I had been in the wine industry for years before beer and tasting to learn was a huge part of my job and I let that carry over into beer. So, trading really helped me become who I am today as a brewer, as well as a palate that has been doing this for years.

Now, I could come on here and say that trading it bad because people now use it for profit, but damn, come on, who is going even care about that stance? Also, its good to note that for every profiteering trader/seller, there are 100 people that truly go by what I would call the "old ways" of trading - hooking up friends and others around the country because of the friendships that they have built. I will always be pro-trading and anti-selling... I know that there are a lot of areas now in between those stances, but that's just how things have gotten...

We still, on occasion, set up our line before some of the releases to promote bottle sharing. I usually try to get out and try a couple of things too. These times are my favorite releases as people are coming together and sharing what they brought. I would assume that 99% of those beers shared in a large group like that are from trades. Not going to find a lot of people opening up $1000 bottles in a huge group like that. So, those times still remind me that most of the enthusiasts in this industry like what I like - trading, sharing, tasting...

 

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I'm a trader, I love trading. if you delve back into this thread, you'll see that I (along with a few others) don't like that members have traded their member beers, let alone selling them. We feel it's disrespectful to you. So, understand that these comments come from a world where we WANT your beers to be drank and shared by the people that you invited to your membership. I think that's how it's meant to be. If someone traded a member bottle for something reasonable with a friend, that'd be one thing. Instead, we're rallying against the same profiteers that are selling your beers.

 

was going to say something along these lines the other day (and i would reckon most people are in this boat) but this is exactly why i am more than okay with on-site Derivation releases. as someone who is 3 hours away, it’s an easy enough drive that i have no problem going down to split a bottle with a couple friends plus bringing some really excellent to-go bottles home. if it were to-go it would be either silent release or less than 2 hours notice and i would never make and would never have the ammo to trade for one.