Post Black Friday Bourbon County

So I have Templeton Rye and Bramble Rye from years past and if anyone around downtown SD has Prop/Vanilla/Coffee and wants to share, I'd be happy to pop mine open. I'm sure we could find some combination of regular/barleywine/other beers to open too. BM if interested.

 

Obviously.

The receipt is in my car which is parked outside in the rain. I am inside in my socks sipping a DBA.

I figured a timely heads up about a possible location to get the beer was more pressing than an accurate-to-the-dollar price.

 

a friend posted elsewhere (Tuesday) that a Whole Foods in SF had some this past weekend. he didn't say which though. from what else i was able to discern, there were shipments this week to smaller accounts/stores. i managed to get my share Monday afternoon. that was the actual price on the Vanilla too. the four packs were all priced 5.75 per bottle.

 

Disguising Vanilla Rye as Gulden Draak... no wonder it was still sitting there.

 

lol, you're trippin'. that's two pictures. the Golden Goose is on the shelf above the 4pks in the lower picture. Vanilla was in it's proper case box if you actually click on the 1st/top picture to isolate & expand it.

 

Whole Foods sells Apple Jacks? I never noticed that.

edit: Oh, or were those your photos from Monday? Not that it's terribly important.

 

Lol yeah, I tried to edit my post but this lovely mobile version of BA doesnt allow me...

 

that ain't Whole Foods. i said a friend happen to post elsewhere that he found some at a Whole Foods over the weekend. meaning, either they held theirs back OR allocations are still just being filled . in the case of the store i hit, these were delivered Monday morning. my point was it probably hasn't all come & gone, at least not in SF. as Professor Moody would say: "Constant vigilance".

 

Anyone know if Whole Foods Laguna Niguel or Jamboree in Orange County have already received their allocations?

 

For sure, plus I don't think these bottles are quite as rare as they feel. There's the big flood on TG friday, but a lot of the distribution isn't quite so coordinated. Last year I was still stumbling across the stout at Christmas time.

 

i don't know. i would not fool around. i assume most of you saw the thread discussing issues with the release? this is just a random thought that might make sense. most of the problems seemed back east. there were some serious weather issues back that way - wondering if some of the issues discussed weren't the result of these pushed out where some freezing occurred?

all bottles were clean at the shop i got mine - BUT the necks on most of the Vanillas were noticeably *sticky*. my mention of this is to say, depending on what may be lost due to these supposed issues, i would say it's probably wiser to NOT rely too heavily on last year's experience. if people are telling the truth & distributors are turning back whole allocations/shipments, it may very well turn out to be rarer than ever imagined. 2¢

p.s. Disclaimer for anybody reading: please do NOT take my comment to equate to a scare tactic & run out in a frenzy. i'm offering what seems like potential commonsense & practical (to me). if you think it's way off, disagree etc, by all means ignore.

cheers!

 

True, the situation in beer is changing every year now. I was more thinking that the hype around this beer in particular makes it seem like more of a score than statistically it really is if your time horizon is extended a little bit. Going by the barrelage numbers posted in another thread, there are about 1900 barrels of stout produced this year, which I think translates to about 600,000 bottles (maybe someone can correct that; I'm a lay person when it comes to industrial bottling). Vanilla should have about 30,000 bottles. So, for example, I think that's on a similar order of production with FW's Double DBA. Which is all to say that these aren't common beers, but they shouldn't be impossible to find either. Except that people go a bit more apeshit for this than they do for FW, which obviously complicates estimation.

In the end, I think my 2¢ agree with yours: it's not going to fall into your lap if you're not looking for it, but keep an eye open and you have a chance of finding it.

 

It makes sense. Last year, I got regular BCBS at two Bevmos definitely a few weeks after Black Friday (didn't even know that was a thing) and it was quite possibly in January. There's a fucking zero percent chance of that happening this year because of the Black Friday Bourbon County frenzy that GI/InBev's marketing created. Half of the threads in Beer Talk are Black Friday related. There were people lined up at stores that didn't even get variants in the Central Coast this year. I strongly doubt that was the case last year. If you haven't gotten any, you might stumble up some from a later shipment, but this train has left the station. Party's over, guys...unless you think lining up on Black Friday, which is not different than what people do at Walmart is somehow "fun".

 

BCS at Vons? wow. what kind of bizzaro world are we living in now?

 

The picture he posted looked like they were stashed almost, crushed in between shocktop and heineken. Ah well, he got lucky. I wish I had a craving for pickles that took me to Vons randomly.

 

Whole Foods at the District got theirs already and sold it on Black Friday along with tapping a keg of BCBS.

 

To be honest, I had a great time lining up. GI crushed their event. Gift bags to the first 100 people, free coffee and donuts while in line, free posters, optional breakfast catering once inside($5 for a heaping plate of french toast with BCBVS sauce), and BCBCS + BCBS on draft (at 7 in the morning). Beyond the help from GI, just standing in line with people of similar interest, nerding out to beer, was a good time in it's own right.

Sometimes I want to hate GI for being a part of a corporate monster, but I just can't.

 

Out of curiosity, where was this? GI as in, one of the pubs in Chicago? I mean, that sounds like a decent time, but I'm just not big on the whole lining up for things, especially for beers that you used to be able to stumble upon, which is not so much the case for variants, but still regular used to be a shelf beer.

 

I had a great time as well. As you said it was fun, albeit nerdy, to hang out with fellow enthusiasts into the deep hours of the night/morning. We didn't get french toast (salty about that) but we did get donuts, coffee, and a gift bag. I actually had some of the coffee this morning. It was pretty tasty!

As much as I hate to admit it, I'd do it again.

 

I had a great time hunting down BCBS this year. It was really fun. Although, I didn't do anything extreme.

I didn't line up on Black Friday and walked away with all variants except for Vanilla (though I had it on tap) either pre or post Black Friday. Good times.