Liquor Stores - Twin Cities at Capacity?

Nope, but more moms n' pops could spread some of that saweet, sweet Craft Beer love around. EDIT: There was another thread a while back in which some functionary from Summit (Chip, was that you?) or other addressed the issue of old-stock Saga that turned out to not be very old at all, to whit: Two month-old packaged beer is a reasonable, sale-able product*.

Fair point once those same beers have sat for more than five or six months and are now past-code beer: There are plenty of 'deals!' to be had on such floor and cooler stock, locally.

(I've visited several "beer museums" recently, but am too polite to name names. Know your codes! )

*If kept in ideal (cold and dark, kinda like mushrooms) conditions.

 

I was at a store the other day that has a fair amount of craft. Thought about grabbing some Bitter Woman, as I havent had it in forever. Checked the bottle date, January 12, 2012. Not bad I thought, only a few months old. Waiiiiiiiiiiiiit, its not 2012!!!

Really is important to just know bottle codes, because you sure cant count on retailers pulling old stock off the shelf.

 

If it is past date besides not buying it you should politely alert the store manager. Good stores do not want to sell past date beer. Good distributors do not want stores selling past date beer. Good brewers do not want consumers drinking past date beer. Past date beer can arrive from seemingly nowhere. Usually it is a simple oversight by someone in the supply chain. If you see a place that has many beers from different breweries past date that is indicative of another problem in the store.

I think we all have a stake in keeping fresh beer on the shelves.

 

Salesmen pay back commission or pay full cost when they pull beer from stores. Drivers hate to handle beer an extra two times. Distributors are forced to warehouse and then destroy the beer that gets old. Retailers don't like unsold inventory using up available cash. The only winners are the distributor's employees that can buy near-date or out of season beer for next to nothing. Thanks to the liquor stores who buy way too much Oktoberfest and to the customers that won't touch it after November 1 (it's my favorite style).

 

That 2012 will be a fun experiment for when you drink your 4 year vertical of Bitter Woman next month

 

Bumping a good 'ol thread with word of Total Wine coming to the Twin Cities.

 

Is this good, bad or neither?

Good being more competition and what sounds like a great selection of beer?

Bad being more pressure on small/independent retailers and with that many beers they cant all turn over every few months. Also, do they get preferential treatment from distributors because they probably buy large volumes? (eating up a disproportionate amount of the KBS, BCBS, ect for the metro?)

 

No because they are just helping the market rather than hurting it. Nice to find a whale/or sought after beer just hanging out.

 

Surly has started to branch out a bit more recently. A few of the Mom & Pop stores by my house carry it now, In cans even. According to the sign on the door at least I don't even mess with Furious right now, what with Bitter Brewer and Over Rated in full swing. Not to mention Shenanigans...

 

Why does this bother you? I want as many product and purchasing options as possible. The more stores that sell craft means that I have more options at lower prices, and that sales will go up and grow the segment even more. As for out of code stuff? Know which stores to trust when it comes to fresh hoppy stuff.

 

Good! Lower prices, more options. I bet we'll see a few new breweries in the state with 'em.

 

Before my eyes even stopped rolling the words "large, national chain" had loaded.

 

I know, right? And they can probably single-handedly open the state to Sunday Sales.

 

A Total Wine came to Huntington Beach, CA while I lived there. Knowing some of the selections around the area, TW will just become another stop that will have a handful of items that seemingly nobody else will, but they are also rather weak at a lot of things. The positive may be that we won't have to pay $10 for Stone IRS bombers and some breweries like that work closely with TW. But for most breweries that they offer, they will have some, but not all of their selections and rarely seem to do seasonal or limited releases very well. I found this in their spirits, as well. They have a huge selection of spirits and wine (obviously), but if you ever read a review about something available in your area and then go to TW, you are pretty much guaranteed that they will have no idea what you are talking about and will show it in a database without the ability to order it. The one benefit that I saw with them (and saw with other chain liquor stores) is that if they are fed from a distribution center from a distance, that you may be able to get certain releases that they inevitably will be the only ones who have it. For instance, all of the Bev'Mo stores are serviced by a DC in the Bay Area. So beers that were distributed only as far down as Northern CA, were available at Bev'Mo locations everywhere. So for years before Deschutes had grown and the Northern CA area was as far South as they had reached, Bev'Mo was then shipping their beers an extra 500 miles to their stores. Similarly, there were beers that TW had in their store basically as exclusives, because they were available at a regional DC and then being shipped outside the region. But CA is about the size of three midwest states, so I am not sure how this might work when crossing actual state lines.

But I have been saying this for years of traveling all over the country, that the Twin Cities area is one of the best distribution hubs for craft beer, across the whole country. And I just looked at the states that have TW and none are bordering nor even close. So as opposed to benefiting from a DC in a state like WI, it may end up that they want to set up a DC in MN and then if there was a benefit, it might be if stores were to then open and be fed from that MN distribution center, in neighboring states like Iowa or Wisconsin.

 

Total Wine is Awesome!!!

On a side note, I wish we had he same problem in the Roch. Still no Bitter Brewer down here. Bunch of nonsense...

 

DC has different retail laws than most. A store in DC can resell liquor items that are purchased privately. That is pretty unique, not many States can do this legally. Bevmo or Total Wine would have to buy ALL the beer they sell in Minnesota through a MN State licensed beer distributor just like every other store in town. They would not be selling beer that other stores in town don't have unless it's a private labeled beer of theirs.

 

Sorry, I think that you understood my jump to abbreviating "distribution center" to just "DC" as being a reference to Washington D.C.. Maybe it isn't as widely used elsewhere, as it is in my world, but anytime I hear the letters "dc," even when people are are speak it, it is almost always a reference to a distribution center. Sorry if anybody thought that I was making some random jump to start talking about the District of Columbia.

 

So if beer is sitting, wouldn't that also mean that there is too much beer on the shelves and/or too few people buying it? There was a thread in the beer talk forum about a bubble. I'm not going to comment on whether there's a bubble or not, but it seems to me that there really is a lot of beer being brewed that people aren't buying.