Although it’s clearly off topic now: about seven people have asked in the FB group if members are getting it. So it’s either getting ignored or answered in some fashion.
Bringing it slightly back on-topic here (Side Project mentioned!) but some interesting insight — mainly, the bottle counts — from the Xul founder in the Tier 2/3 Keyholder Facebook group: It's good to see some transparency, even though it didn't really answer the O.P. question of "why not just sell to the members first...?" I can't speak for the previous few releases, but it seems obvious (with this being the first Xul bottle release in the Nashville taprooms) that they're using this release to help promote/drive traffic toward the newly-assumed locations.
If you can't support growth in your ability to produce more beer then you can't support growth in your membership. It's not a hard concept.
My first thought - if you don't have the barrel quantity to pull from, why is your membership rate so high? But the transparency is actually refreshing.
This is where I was going to go with this as well. You're not in a tough spot - you took the membership money. It's a self inflicted wound.
Not to white-knight for Xul too hard, but since they're one of my homestate breweries, a few points in response to the above: If you pay for Xul's 2nd-tier membership ($200), you get 4 of their BA stouts included. Released quarterly-ish. Members only. If you pay for 1st-tier ($300), you get two bottles of each of those. 8 BA stouts, 500ml each (I think?) guaranteed. ~$37.50 a bottle, assuming that you don't get value out of any other perks throughout the year. Xul released 7 BA stouts/barleywines in 2025 by my count (not including the Kill the Lights exclusive, which was blended with non-BA stout anyway) and the members got 4 of those automatically and exclusively. You get 15% discount off all beers in the taproom, 15% off merch (and that's ... ahem, any day of the week), you get the early access to Kill the Lights tickets which are a hot item, and can reserve their insanely (over)hyped PB&J mixtape variants any time they drop 'em. And those are shockingly easy to flip if you're trying to extract every bit of value possible. All the typical stuff like members-only party, free glassware, tchotchkes etc. I don't really think they're growing the membership by much if at all, either. @Heisenbrew correct me if I'm wrong on that one. 300 is still tiny in comparison to LC, right? In conclusion: As a member of LC I have a hard time looking over @Xul and thinking that's a bad value
I was in Xul when it was great. My proxy left the state. Now that I hear all this I’m not feeling so bad anymore lol. One thing for sure tho, their beers don’t hold up at all so drink them fresh!
Tiny compared to LC for sure, but this is by far the biggest the membership has been. Started at 100, went to 150ish, went back down a little, it was at 200 last year, and now it’s at 300 for the bottle tiers. That’s not including the tier 3/PB&J mixtape tier. ISO all SP/Xul collabs. Except I really hope the one in STL isn’t BA Ritual…..
So they have tripled their member numbers and are now struggling to give members bottles. It’s turning into the LC problem.
Yeah I mean I don’t think there’s anything incorrect about that framing. The only reason I joined was to get in on their XKS action, the members-only stouts. And the occasional mixtape variant. With the early access to Kill the Lights tix being a distant 3rd reason…. and early access to the other ~3 (ish?) public bottles a year not a consideration at all. I’ve never had issues getting those as a non-member though. Xul’s audience/demand is not even close to the scale of SP’s I guess. But I can understand why the members who are used to getting every single bottle routed their way first might be rankled. Still might be a better deal though, 4 stouts for $200 (or 8 for $300) versus 1 for $246.35 Full agree, really hope it's not Ritual and great with anything else. I missed the With Knox drop last year and I'm not salty about it one bit, no sireee...
Yeah the recent release had 60 bottles go on oznr for members( there's more than 60 members) and they saved the rest to release at their multiple locations.
Yeah I have been a member since year 1. Anytime I saw any beer advertised, it was just a matter of time before it showed up for members. The particular release you mentioned....they didn't even mention initially if it was going to be made available to members. Bummer when it sold out in 6 minutes because they offered so few to the members. Touch salty I will miss out on this one
Still plenty left in Nashville if you’d like me to grab you one! Each taproom here only got 72 bottles… so we got there early yesterday since there was so much hubbub about the ‘shortage’ on this one. We ended up hanging out for about 5hours and, outside of my group that bought 7 or 8 bottles total …. We saw maybe half a dozen other bottles sold. Apparently there were still over 30 bottles left today. So yeah, happy go try to grab one for you tomorrow and send it to you or hang onto it till the next big SP meetup/whatever’s clever. That goes for future bottles too. Doesn’t seem like it’ll be much of an issue. Just lemme know!
Xul Keyholder Society. It would have been sent in the first email. The link actually works and you can join, unlike a certain other unofficial FB group for a membership that’s never been easily joinable because the group is set as hidden.
