Growler trade questions

I trade strictly $4$. It's amazing what happens when things are fair and even.

 

I don't know how much people are looking for the beer you are offering (as I don't know anything about it) but I see no reason you couldn't trade for the others. Typically growlers of Toppling Goliath can be gotten for $9.99 + glass in certain areas although I think it's slightly higher at the brewery. Whenever I have been at Cigar City the growlers seemed to be reasonably priced ($10-15 maybe for a 32oz + glass). Note that Cigar City and all breweries in Florida (I think?) can only sell 32oz. or 128oz growlers. For some reason they can't sell 64oz growlers. There are weird beer laws everywhere. As mentioned above, most growlers trade $4$ with similar rarity. I don't think anything that Cigar City or Toppling Goliath sells in growlers is normally rare. They may sell some rare ones now or then but typically if either has a hard to get beer on tap they won't do growlers.

If what you are getting growlers of is barrel aged (can't tell from the name) and it's good I would likely consider it more rare than most growlers than the breweries you mentioned. You just need to find someone local with access.

 

Personally, I'd (almost) never trade for a growler of something that's also bottled. There's far to much uncertainty in growler fills unless it's on a counter-pressure system, and even then I don't know if the growler was properly cleaned and sanitized.

 

You can stand them up, just make sure you contact all folks working for the shipper to make sure they always keep it standing up in its travels to partner.

1. Plumbers' Tape tight around cap
2. Thick plastic bag around growler tightly.
3. Bagged growler into its own small box packed tightly with bubble wrap inside
4 Small box into bigger box also packed tightly with thick padding all around smaller box

 

Start all your trades thinking $4$ for equally limited beer, but even better is to simply put up the beer for something that you want to drink. Go $4$ for Toppling Goliath, Alpine, Societe, Boneyard, Tired Hands, CCB, Funky Buddha, HF (a little more challenging), etc. Quite frankly, I don't know if Pugachev's Cobra is really that sought after. I see bottles offered up for trade every so often, but no really ISO for it.

The majority of my trades involved growlers, usually 2 or more. My tips:

1. Ship only swing top 1L growlers if possible. These tend to maintain carbonation better and not too unwieldy to ship. They fit, albeit very snuggly, into 750ml styrofoam shippers (3-bottle is ideal), but I have used cardboard Spirited Shippers.

2. Tape the swing arms and caps well. I use packing tape since you can't really seal anything with tape with a swing top. The primary purpose is to prevent the cap to pop out.

3. You can individually bag each growler or you can bag the styro or cardboard set of growlers into a small trash bag. I do the latter 90% of the time. Keep in mind, I line every box I ship out with a large thick contractor trash bag to give a 2-layer leak/breakage protection. As long as you have 2 layers, to me, it doesn't matter if you bag the growlers individually or collectively.

4. I've shipped growlers in all orientation, vertical, side-way flat, side-way one of top of another, and all made there safely and no partner has yet complained about quality while keep asking for more growlers . With styro, you don't have to worry about padding, with cardboard Spirited Shipper shipping vertical is ideal since they are designed to have padding on top and bottom. Otherwise, you need to make sure there is sufficient padding on the bottom of the box to absorb impacts.

Good luck!

 

Don't tighten the lid too tight either, I did with channel-locks and it leaked out. I plastic bagged and garbage bagged it so it arrived there no problem, other then the liquid being outside of the growler! That was the only hiccup I had and that was only once. I just tightened it too tight and didn't realize I probably over did it.