Cascade suspending interstate bottle sales for now...

I wonder if there is any chance this lowers there prices? It has seemed for a while that they have been unable to sell a lot to the Portland beer community at the price points they have set. If they can't ship anymore, and they keep prices where they are, they might be sitting on back stock of beer for a long time!

 

......and there goes their brilliant strategy at pricing themselves out of the local market.

 

Maybe we'll see some of the more "raer" bottles up in Seattle now.

 

I'd love the price drop for sure. Not sure that will happen though. They do seem to sell out of the 30 dollar on site stuff though. Sure it takes a bit but every beer won't fly off the counter.

 

Cascade's trade value just went up again! BOOOOOOM.

 

FT: Noyaux

 

I don't give a shit about trading or trade value, but I do enjoy some good nerd rage over things.

 

They better widen their distribution. I don't see them surviving if they have to charge $30/bottle to break even in a market with great sours at half the price. Their stuff just sits around for months, upwards of a year+ now. Its not hard to find Project 2011 bottles around town.

 

I've wondered for a long time how this works, since I was under the impression that shipping across state lines to individuals wasn't legal.

Between this and the recent story about LetsPour, I can't help but wonder if there is some crackdown going on in the realm of shipping direct to individuals, which worries me, given the fact that I will buy beers that I can't get locally through various online vendors.

Until further notice--NO ONE SHARE WHERE THEY GET THEIR ONLINE BEERS SO THE FUZZ DOESN'T GET WISE TO IT.

 

Art has some beer that people really want. He has worked hard for many years to arrive at this point. I drank a Blueberry 750 with my son, daughter, and son in law at about 4000ft (Elk Ridge Mountain) on the 4th, with a piece of freshly baked blueberry pie. The berries were from the yard, picked hours before, and it was wonderful.

 

Some states yes, others no. Each state sets it's own rules for shipping alcohol.

 

What's the story? I know they suddenly went out of business, but is there more to it?

 

So does this mean I can finally trade my Apricots?

 

Cascade tried to say that you accepted delivery of the beer *AT CASCADE* and then were shipping it to yourself. Little disclaimer at checkout. Probably figured that by paying whatever Oregon taxes were due they'd placate the folks most likely to harass them. Guess it didn't work that way.

 

Or probably has to do with the fact that UPS and other delivery services are starting to crack down on beer shipments from "non-authorized liquor distributors," which by law are the only ones that can ship beer anywhere in the United States. See, LetsPour's recent online store closing http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...effective-tomorrow.188726/page-2#post-2527300

 

Nothing that I know of explicitly. I'm reading between the lines a bit, but in both cases, businesses that, until recently, had been able to ship directly to individual consumers via a private carrier like UPS (I don't know who Cascade used), abruptly announced that their business had done an about face with regards to the shipping aspect of their business (in LetsPour's case, shipping was all of their business, hence the complete closure).

The strange part--at least from the LetsPour perspective--is that when I ordered from there, all boxes were clearly marked as containing alcohol with additional instructions not to deliver to a drunk person and that a 21 year old must sign for the shipment.

Gotcha. Thanks for the additional info. Nice little loophole--shame it didn't work out, apparently.

It makes me wonder if the "crack down" is coming from somewhere other than the businesses themselves. At least originally. It doesn't seem to make sense to cutoff one source of revenue unless they were incurring risk to their business by doing so, perhaps in the form of government entities threatening to make trouble for them if they continued to ship beer in defiance of U.S. liquor laws.

Even FedEx's alcohol shipping policy page says: "FedEx accepts shipments of alcohol (beer, wine, and spirits) within the U.S. and for both U.S. import and export when the shipper and the recipient are licensed to import and/or export alcohol."

In other words, shipping beer to individuals is a no no, but perhaps they absolve themselves of any culpability by having this disclaimer on their policy page?

 

You're definitely right, as there has to be an underlying factor at play that is causing all of this. Just a guess, but I really think that it is the distributors are threatening lawsuit/action against these shipping companies to keep hold on the distributor monopoly that definitely exists in the booze world. In this case, I believe it's an issue that the brewery is trying to sell directly to the individual to cut out the middleman (i.e. distributor) and the distributors are causing a stink, because that means they aren't getting their cut of the $$$ which is all that they care about.

 

I don't think this is very far off. It will be intereting to see if other online beer companies follow.

 

Breweries and even bottle shops hire lawyers schooled in distribution laws to advise them on multiple items, including shipping policies. One successful shop just added a state to their shipping list, so I don't think there is an industry-wide crackdown. I do think that the more states you openly ship to, the more expensive and risky it becomes. Literally anybody could report you and create quite a headache even if you're following the admittedly muddy rules. My guess is that tracking all of the permits/licenses "required" is messier than it sounds, and if just one of them expires and you ship to that state, bam, you could get hit with a hefty warning/fine/loss of license.

A shop or brewery isn't necessarily going to disclose when they get warned, so short of looking it up ourselves, we have no way of knowing if they do or don't have the necessary license in place (nor do we necessarily care, provided our beer gets to us in good shape). But I could see getting hit with a few warnings being enough incentive to halt online sales.