Ninkasi Ground Control

Nothing yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it.

 

Bottles should be hitting Portland this week. I don't know exact pricing yet, but I was told they're going to be ~$20/22oz.

 

It's tasty...definitely exceeded expectations.

 

Well, maybe I'm not looking forward to it that much.

 

Why should we care that their yeast went to space? and can someone explain to me how that adds value?


edit: I understand that it adds value in the economic/cost accounting sense. But can someone explain to me why it adds intrinsic value because it was in space?

 

Seriously, what the fucking shit.

 

I would rather have outer space yeast beer than beard yeast beer.

 

I was tempted because of the hazelnuts added. Would have tried it to see if it compares to the Dark Star hazelnut version.
Not for $20 though!

I've never been impressed with Ninkasi... And that's at $5 for a 22.

 

Ninkasi's overall quality went down a few notches about 3 years ago when their distribution expanded dramatically in size, IMHO. Just not very many interesting beers. None are actively bad, they're just never the best option almost anywhere I go in Seattle. 3 or 4 years ago, though, Tricerahops was one of my go-to DIPAs.

 

For some reason, Ninkasi remains very popular up here. A Ninkasi Brewers Night will fill a bar. T-Dom and Triceratops are consistently great sellers, both on-tap and bottled. They make very nice beers, but I do not understand the cult behind this brewery.

 

It's in Bellingham as of Monday, $21/22oz, I was a bit underwhelmed by it, very strong hazelnut tone. Not sure if I want to age one and see if that does it any favors, but I may. Bottles are moving QUICK.

Apparently though Ninkasi has some more "space yeast" and they are going to be brewing other beers with it. Who knows when though.

 

If that's the price at E-Station, it'll probably be cheaper elsewhere in town. Still, if it's over say $17-18, I'll pass.

 

I used to really like Tricerahops but I haven't had a Ninkasi beer in a few years, so $20 for one of their beers is out of the question. They do extremely well in Spokane though because they are heavily connected with King Beverage (our Bud distributor). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they were they next major BMC buyout.

 

A few months ago I would have thought the same thing about an AB buyout, but then they dropped their ABI distributor and signed with smaller ones. Here's an excerpt from an article on it:

“We are committed to being an independent and locally owned craft brewery, and feel we will be better aligned long term with independent and locally owned wholesalers,” CEO and co-founder Nikos Ridge said in announcing the split with the Anheuser Busch distributors.


Ninkasi also was not comfortable with the fact that Anheuser Busch had itself acquired craft breweries, the most recent being 10 Barrel Brewing of Bend.


“We didn’t want to be part of a group that has a different set of objectives,” Ridge said this week.

 

Thank you for showing me that. It says a lot about them as a company to me, and I won't hesitate to drink a Total Domination next time I see it.

 

I've had multiple drinks with Jamie Floyd, multiple times, and, just my opinion, Ninkasi will be the last brewery to sell out. Now, do they want to be the size of SA or SN? Do they want to be coast-to-coast, and line-to-line? IMHO, yup.