Barrel-aged version easier to obtain than the regular?

5050 Eclipse

 

Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, and Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Stout...

 

BA Santa's Little Helper was easy to find and I'm just seeing Santa's Little Helper.

 

Really? I always see BORIS but BA BORIS sold out in a pretty short amount of time here and I never got any.

 

Strange because both versions are shelf turds here in Columbus.

 

Same in NY

 

I think Night Stalker is dry hopped. To my knowledge, the base beer for BCBS, variants, Night Stalker (dry hopped) and Big John (cocoa nibs) is the same but has never been available.

I see Troegs Flying Mouflan a lot more often than Nugget Nectar.
Also Victory Oak Horizontal, never Old Horizontal.
Weyerbacher Old Heathen and Heresy as well as Blithering Idiot and Insanity seem to be equally available.

 

Central Waters BBBW and Y2K.

 

The base beer is Totality Imperial Stout, which they have bottled and distributed.

http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/14936/53580

 

Old Horizontal hasn't been made since 2011 - but Oak Horizontal was made in 2012. They'll be making Old Horizontal again soon, if not this year, since they're opening up a production brewery.

Is Oak Horizontal available near you? I had a trade set up for one, but haven't heard from the other party in a few weeks. Would love to get my hands on one. Please PM me if you can get this...

 

I'm pretty sure this isn't the case everywhere, but where I shop for beer it is crazy hard to find bottles of Arrogant Bastard, but really easy to get the oaked version. Not sure why this is, but it is something that I never noticed or thought about until I saw this thread.

 

This is what came to mind, but the base beer is called Totality. But I don't know if it is necessarily harder "to obtain" as the Eclipse beers, as much as it is just not seen anywhere near as often as the Eclipse beers. But I have had it a few times in both bottle and keg, so I know that it is out there, I just think that it is less often seen because everybody wants the Eclipse barrel aged beers, while Totality is a rather uneventful imperial stout on its own (which could be part of why it has worked so well for barrel aging).

 

So wait, which do you think is easier to obtain?

 

While neither is "easy" to obtain, I think I've heard that there is less Stormaktsporter than Kaggen Stormaktsporter.

 

It depends on who is doing the obtaining. If it is the consumer (which I think is who the OP was addressing), I would say that the barrel versions are easier to obtain, because that is what every store and beer bar (who have access to them) brings in, because that is what most people are looking for. But for all I know, Totality may be far easier for retailers and bars to get, but because nobody ever looks for Totality, nobody puts the effort into bringing it in (probably because they would rather allocate to attaining all the BA versions that they can get). And possibly the demand for the barrel aged versions probably means that FiftyFifty is allocating more and more of Totality to barrel aging program.

There are a lot of factors here, so all I was saying is that the average consumer in CA sees the various BA eclipse releases a hell of a lot more often than they ever see Totality.

 

I've been searching for the regular with no luck so far. Had the BA a while back & it was flippin' awesome.

 

Yeah I have no way of telling which is the case, whether or not it's just as easy to get Totality as it is to get Eclipse variants. I always assumed they made way more of Eclipse than Totality based on how available other BA Stouts are compared to their regular versions.

For example, regular Abraxas is much easier to get than the BA versions. I'm sure stores try just as hard if not harder to get the BA version of Abraxas as they do to get the regular version but you see regular Abraxas way more in stores. If your logic about Eclipse were true, then BA Abraxas would be easier to get than regular Abraxas because more people want it but that's not the case.

So without knowing bottle counts for sure, that's my logic. I would be surprised it I were wrong but who knows.

 

They make much more Totality than Eclipse(based on the fact its always on tap), but don't bottle it often. I see it online sometimes for 15$ with a one bottle limit. I don't believe there is a limit at 50/50 when its bottled but i've only bought 2 bottles of it at once.

 

That's mainly a timing thing...Y2K is released 1-2 months before BBBW, and usually sells out before or right when BBBW is released. It seems a similar amount is released, at least in my opinion.

 

It isn't a matter of applying logic for one brewery/set of beers and thinking that it is applicable across to other breweries. The whole point of this thread was to point out anomalies, where the barrel aged versions were more common than the base beers. All that I know is that I have had and have seen barrel aged Eclipse releases (seeing = being able to attain) maybe 20 to 30 times more often than Totality. I wasn't trying to make some broad stroke theory here, especially not to be applicable to other breweries. Honestly, before I had to dissect this, I thought that I was making a fairly simple statement that it is easier to obtain barrel aged Eclipse beers than Totality all based on the fact that more stores have the Eclipse beers on the shelves, not Totality..