Sixpoint Beer Purchasing App

Yes, this is the first beer we are small-batch canning out of our original Brooklyn production facility. All sales of this beer will be through the app. Come on down @underwater_ and let us know if you are - send me a PM and we'll keep an eye out for you. And yes, we'll let you interview for our copy writer position.

 

Thanks for the answer! Glad to hear, our tapwater second to none. Will have to tweak my facade redesign a bit before applying to account for the good news.

 

Is this the new model for new beer releases? They will be brewery only and those areas in your distribution footprint will continue to get your current line-up? I enjoy your current beers but would also enjoy trying your new beers but living in WI makes it logistically near impossible to get your brewery only releases.

 

Future Mayor Hillfam Clinton will bring some over next time time she's in Wisconsin.

 

Hilarious man. You got me clowning over here. Not a bad way to start the day.

 

Thats some funny shit right there, well done!

 

Yes, this is the new model for beer releases. We are incubating our product development team with our original production facility and crew headquartered in Red Hook, Brooklyn. That entire space is transforming as we speak and we spent the past 6 months doing an extensive gut renovation.

The local folks (or even folks who are visiting from out of town) will have first-dibs access to these new releases, as they will only be available at the brewery. However, that does not mean that if the beer becomes very popular over time that we won't scale the production of it. We might even harness excess, idle brewing capacity in order to do that. That's something that even @underwater_ can see the practical sense in, right? :-)

I also should let everyone know that we had the option to have our tasting room up and running months ago - even last year if we wanted to. But we intentionally and deliberately chose not to, because we don't want another run-of-the-mill cookie cutter hipster tasting room built from the microbrewery starter pack.

So instead, we took the more arduous and difficult path of doing a complete gut renovation, and we have ripped the entire premises down to the studs and tore up the floors as well. The entire space is going to be reimagined and integrated with our original brewery, humming along and making delicious beers since 2004.

Here are some images of the gut renovation:







And here is the brewing team and part of our Product Development team:




Now let's crush.

I'm an easy target, perhaps too easy given the parlance I drop!

 

This is slander, I said no such thing! I hope you have a good lawyer.

 

@Sixpoint maybe I'm too late to the party, but where is this app? The only Sixpoint app that I see is the Beer Finder.

Or, did I read that the app becomes available tomorrow?

Love your beers, keep up the good work!

 

sign up on the website, youll get an email when the app is live.

 

The beta version of the app will be sent out to people tomorrow. You can sign up for it here:

http://sixpoint.com/beta/

After the first release, we will be releasing the full app for available download in both the iTunes store and the Google Play/Android store as well. But to be clear, that won't happen until after the first release. So you will need the beta version for access to the first round of beers.

 

@Sixpoint The value prop of this app will be if demand > supply. Here are some free ideas for you:

• Instead of beers going on sale at a certain time, provide a window, say Saturday at 8am to Sunday 10pm for people to make their order. This will eliminate the age old fastest connection or quickest to the draw argument. Make people state the maximum amount of beer they want within the max limit.
  
• After this window is over calculate how much beer people want against what you have and set limits accordingly

If can get more complex than this, but this would really be a great way of doing it.

 

Thanks for the free ideas. We are going off the assumption that demand will exceed supply.

For us, the value proposition is already built in for the customer because they wont' have a horrible experience wasting 4 hours of their time standing in line, which is what people in Soviet Russia did while waiting for basic necessities. Buying beer should be a seamless, easy experience - not a 5 hour ordeal.

Your idea is intriguing, but one thing it doesn't do is reward people for "getting there first." Like many things in life, there should be some type of incentive to be the first one there, and if you give too long of a window for all orders to stream in and then reallocate the product in a random way afterwards, it provides no sense of urgency for the customer. You still must act "while supplies last."

Our goal is really to eliminate the wait time and make the customer experience awesome by saving people a ton of time that they normally waste waiting in a line. In terms of the allocation of the product itself, we'll have to see how the first few rounds of releases go in order to gauge demand. After that, we'll be open to making innovations to continue to improve the experience.

cheers

 

I got a pretty good laugh out of this.

SIxpoint does a great job getting craft beer across a broad distro to many folks that otherwise might not have access to much (they really do!), but "spearheading the modern craft beer scene scene in nyc" seems a bit excessive. Even for these beers, there's more interest in whether or not they'll get distro than in using the app.

I haven't seen pricing info anywhere and I know I've seen Sixpoint on BA questioning other brewery's motives behind their pricing. I'm eager to see how much cheaper these beers are than similar options. If they're in that $16-$20 per 4pk range and it's argued out of necessity because of small batch and blah blah scaling and premium single source hops, the circle of hypocrisy will be complete.

 

I am going to respectfully disagree on rewarding people for getting there first. This caters to the most extreme people in the culture. The average person who just wants to buy beer can't or won't line-up, they get shut out and won't be a customer. Once the extreme people move on to the next greatest thing, you are left with a very diminished customer base. Some of the people who go to extremes to line-up for beer also do illegal or undesirable things because it goes hand in hand with the extreme behavior they will go to to line-up for hours in advance of opening. Drinking illegally in public streets, driving drunk, illegally re-selling beer, urinating in public, disrupting the piece and quiet of neighborhoods, the list goes on and on. This of course is not everyone, but why reward these people?

On-line this would just shift to the people who enlist 20 friends to get try to buy the beer, or those who have many devices and technology to get an advantage over those who won't go to extremes. Why reward those people ?Look at concert tickets, average Joe has no chance and pays inflated prices for concert tickets because the pros have an advanatge. Do you really want to reward this behavior?

 

I dunno...while that's probably best in a vacuum, I think it's excusable for Sixpoint to try to capitalize off of a little bit of excitement/hype/rarity/whatever if the only inconvenience is that you have to hit refresh for a minute or two. I think we're a long way from a concert-like problem where the stuff sells out in seconds.

 

As its been said multiple times, there are multiple breweries in the city that already offer online pre-sales that dont sell out. Beer is not concert tickets, average joe will be fine. At least for now...

 

My points and arguments are predicated on that this app will only have value if demand exceeds supply. If not, the app is moot.

 

There have been numerous instances of releases selling out in seconds. It happened last week with Kane. I doubt it will be an issue for Sixpoint, but they're talking about this as a "line killer" which online sales have proven not to be.

I really just don't understand how this form of online sale is anything different than anyone else. If other half wanted to adopt online sales to kill lines they could have and would have already. I really just don't see what's new here that's gonna "kill lines".

Also LOL @Sixpoint talking about doing something "different from hipster breweries" by opening up a taproom with a hazy IPA can release

 

Let's take a step back - I think this level of discussion with a brewery is very cool. Not a lot of other places engaging customers in this way.