Central Waters Anniversary

It's a shame that some people did not enjoy themselves.
It seems people showed up for bottles, showed up for bottles and to party, or to just party. It's too bad that one had to interfere with another (for some).

With that said, Central Waters threw a fantastic party. Minimal wait for fantastic beers on tap, and at a great price. Exodus was freaking awesome as always, 16 was drinking really nice, and the Coulee was the surprise of the night for me. A nice refreshing break from all the barrel aged goodness on tap.

Shout out to the musicians as well. Some really quality picking going on in that corner, and there was a good crew of people that seemed to be really enjoying it.

Sure there are some things CW can do better, but for the amount of bottles that went out that door, the amount of glasses poured and the overall quality of said beer, it was a fantastic Anniversary Party. Congratulations to Central Waters, top class brewery indeed.

 

First time coming out for the Central Waters Anniversary party, and I had a great time. Got to Central Waters around 1:45, was able to get inside the 16 purchase tent right away and waited until about 2:45 to get my bottles (while friends and generous strangers were sharing beer and commiserating about the cold).

The anniversary party itself was a great time with easily accessible beer and food and a pretty nice layout (love parties like 4Elf / CW Anniversary that take place in the brewery). While I didn't partake in the main bottle share area we camped out near the bottling line and had a great time sharing beers until about 7pm when I took off.

My only complaints were the lack of easily accessible water (personally I think charging money for water instead of putting our free water coolers at beer events is a poor choice), and the organization of the 16 line (which has been well covered and I believe can be easily fixed with more employees / volunteers checking id's, having more than 1 way in and out of the tent, having a beer station in the tent area to allow folks waiting for bottles the ability to enjoy the party atmosphere, etc...).

Even with the issues I'll certainly be penciling this event into my calendar for 2015 and I hope the constructive feedback makes this event even more enjoyable in the future.

Cheers!

 

Well said @MarcatGSB, but you forgot one thing.

#DeathByCraig

 

I don't know about that. The one guy in front of me with 4 proxy orders and his own went pretty quick compare to the couple right next to him that were each picking up a single order. They took 10 minutes to find their own ID's. Proxy guy had everything out and ready. Picked up 5 orders in half the time they took for two.

I think a database on iPads/tablets instead of a single guy checking names off a list is where the improvement needs to come from.

That's my .02, I thought it was a great event and am looking forward to next year!

 

#deathbycraig

They gave you a free grocery bag man...not even a thank you for that?

 

I bet there are still bottles left right now! No line!!

 

That or just mail out/let us print actual tickets with barcodes to scan.....having it be will call for that many people was the mistake in my view.

 

That was a badass grocery bag too. Heading over to Trader Joe's with it right now. Ungrateful bastards. And I'm not mistaken

 

Just want to say, yeah, the 16 bottle line sucked but I've certainly been in worse (cough: Dark Lord Day:cough). I got there about 5:30 and my wait was about 1.5 hours. CW have already said that will address it for next year and I have no reason to doubt it. Outside of that everything else was great. As others mentioned the beer lines were short, spacing in the brewery was great, toasted ravioli was delcious and most importantly 16 was outstanding (imo). Only wish I could have had another pour of 16 but I had to drive home. The bus shuttles looked to be a great mode of transportation too.

 

shoutout to the chick in front of us in line who got SEVEN CASES

 

A guy in front of us got 200 bottles. Seems a bit excessive and it did slow the line down quite a bit.

 

I know some liquor stores were offering to pick up allotments for people.

That's one way CW could reduce the wait - let retailers doing mass proxy pick-up do so off to the side. Maybe call ahead to schedule a time.

 

I hope they don't do that -- there's just too much room for significant issues/abuse, between a whole raft of people handing over copies of their IDs to someone they don't know and stores potentially (inevitably) trying to commercialize the event on their end.

I'd much rather see CW limit the number of proxies an individual can pick up for, to keep it about those who are big enough fans/supporters to make the trek.

 

Good points, but it’s not up to CW to babysit people and their ID’s. That being said, I agree that it could put a different spin on things and change the vibe of the event.

Limiting the # of proxy orders you can do could eliminate some of the hold up (*). Maybe make it a +1 event. You can get your order and 1 other, that’s it.

* I wasn’t there, so this is just speculation from the comments people have left about the event. 1 person who’s ½ in the bag and can’t find their ID can easily be more of a holdup than someone picking up 5 orders, but who has their act together. And even with those complaints, it does sound like it went smoother than the previous release events. I’ve no doubt that CW is already looking for ways to iron out some of the glitches and make the 2015 release that much better.

 

What gets me about everyone who complains about these events is that everyone conveniently forgets how bad almost every other large scale event seems at the time. I can't believe someone said above to do it like Dark Lord Day, when between DLD and their XV party, some people couldn't even get in to the venue until after waiting in line for up to 5 hours. And that was even before getting in the bottle line. Also keep in mind that for Darkness, there is about 2 hours of ID checking and wrist banding that goes on before the venue even opens.

To clarify some other things for the posters above:
-It was advertised that the line started at 2:00, but the event didn't start until 3:00 to give some people a better chance to get rid of their bottles before coming to drink. They gave an extra hour (the event always has started at 3:00, or has for the past 4 or 5 years at least) for bottle purchasing, they did not take an hour of your drinking time.
-To the volunteer point, there are certain aspects you can't, or at least shouldn't, source to volunteers. ID checking is one of them. That was the only real bottleneck, as the sale aspect went quick afterwards. I'm sure they will have more employees doing the checking next year.
-They did ask at least one person they knew who was getting multiple proxies to come to the table before 2:00 since they were already part of the pre-party event.
-There are always new problems that no one thinks of to slow things down. Someone mentioned above that you could have split the lines alphabetically, but what if you are an E and your proxy pickups are M, R, and W? Changing a system on the fly rarely ends well.

I am not affiliated with CW, but I just can't stand people bashing them even though they make every effort to put out great product and have a great party. If you know anything about them, you know they are already coming up with plans to fix every issue that came up. Be constructive with your criticism and they will address it.

 

Yeah, the people getting 200+ bottles was pretty crazy. I got there around 1:30 and we were about 5th in line. I personally didn't care about waiting until 2:30 or 2:40, but did feel bad for people standing outside in 4 degree weather with 30-45 mph winds while one group makes numerous trips out to their cars. Me, I was next to that giant heater and it was burning my ass, so I didn't have anything to complain about.

I don't care if people are picking up beer for 40 others, but your @ss should be last not first as it held the line up for everyone else. Or maybe they could of just designated one volunteer to sort their $hit out so the entire line wasn't shut down. One of the brewery employees came by apologizing and said the same thing.

Whatever, I got there a whopping 30 minutes before the sales were supposed to start and there were no real issues for my group. The beers on tap were awesome, volunteers were really friendly and I had a great time.

 

this is the best post

people complaining have 20/20 hindsight to operate off of. planning these kinds of things is really difficult.. especially when they are doing it concurrently with their regular all-consuming job.

"special release" sales were leaps and bounds better this year than last. the only "problem" was getting 16. which, by the way, you could enjoy on draft all day... while you waited to buy bottles of 16. you could also grab a bite to eat, share beers and mix with friends. which is what everyone was doing in the rest of the building anyways.


the ironic part is that the people doing the most complaining.. are the ones who are making it worse.

 

Great party. Love the ticketed system to ensure you get bottles. Loved the fact that other bottle sales were in a separate area. Cash only is great as it makes things go more quickly. Too many positive things to list.

Regarding the anniversary beer bottle pick up, CW doesn't want to make people pre-purchase bottles and then have something come up where individuals can't make it to the party. As many here are doing you look at the bottleneck and improve upon it as I know they will. One person checking through a long list for names was the bottleneck. So you either do the Google spreadsheet with several people crossing off names or you separate by creating lanes and have groupings of last names by their first letter. The latter would be more difficult with people picking up proxy (which was also a nice gesture by CW, but maybe limit the number of proxies per person) as they may have to go through multiple lanes but it would work with my further suggestion below. Within this name search station I recommend them giving a allotment token per person/proxy. When you have all your allotment tokens you then move to a station where you determine the number of bottles you want per allotment token, pay cash for them and in turn you are handed a pick up token (or something) that lists the total number of bottles you paid for and can pick up. Then you move to the final station where you trade this pick up token for the bottles.
If they had a sense of how long it would take to move people through this new process they could even go one step further and have an initial station where they check ID and give you a numbered wrist band which includes groups for bottle pick up times. People can police themselves and line up by that wrist band number in their specific group. But I'm not sure they would need to go with this step as just improving the bottleneck from this year should speed things up sufficiently.

Great party. Thanks to CW and I hope I can be back for many years to come!

 

@SipIt so were you one of the young men that was trying to talk the 70 year old woman down from cutting in line? That was quite an experience.
Lady "I've been here for two hours trying to find out where to line up"
Young dude "Yah, it's behind these 100 people".
Lady "I just want six bottles"
Young dude "Lady, if we let you cut, all these people are going to be upset with us and you"
Lady "Fuck it let em be, I'm cutting then".
LOL really fun to watch go down.

 

Haha, nope I didn't notice that, but there were some elderly people a group or so behind me that didn't cut.