The Alchemist (January/February 2018)

I'll be in New England area towards end of Jan, how hard it is to get hold of few 4-packs?
Is there any limit on buying beer at Brewery?

 

Not difficult if you go to the brewery. They post limits on their homepage of what is available at the start of each day. Link is in the first post.

 

I can only speak for buying at the brewery. Was there on 12/30/17 and showed up at 10:45 and only a few cars in the parking lot waiting for opening at 11 (albeit being negative 10 dgrees out). They had 6 different beers for can sales, all capped at 6 4-pack max, besides Heady.

 

Are the blended months a sign of the times and the Alchemist beginning to lose it's fan base?

 

So much attention is focused on Tree House/Trillium in this forum now. That's fine by me.

 

Alchemist has fallen behind the times imo. May not even need bi-monthly threads at this point.

 

Sadly, yes. Appears to impact Hill Farmstead as well. The thread durations are indeed directly tied to the respective fan bases as each fan must check in to each thread to indicate they are still a fan of the brewery. Fan check-ins for both are plummeting as you've noticed. Just a matter of time before the respective threads are quarterly I'm afraid.

 

Isn't a lot of it geography / weather?

 

Riiiiiiiiiiiigggghhhhttt....

 

All good by me. I’ve got no problem with Focal hitting Burlington area stores this week or making the 45 mindeive to the brewery basically any time without worry about lines and allotments. And yah hillfarmstead sucks now no need to travel to the NEK and buy more beer than your wallet can Handle, when you can stand in line at treehouse.

 

Still prefer alchemist and hill farmstead to any brewery in Massachusetts. Also prefer von trapp to any brewery in Massachusetts as well. Just wish it was not so far away...

 

There is less chatter on the Alchemist threads because there is less mystery. Go to the brewery. Get beer. Done.

 

Exactly

 

Great time of year. 3 4-pack limit on Focal at the Co-op for $13. Cannot beat that.

 

Sales of Alchemist beers must still be close to capacity as I haven't seen any uptick in keg/tap beers aside from HotW....if demand wanes - it will be interesting to see if they just increase can dist. footprint or expand draft accounts or both. HF stuff seems to be on tap all over northern VT. and they've obviously started canning as well (and amazingly the stuff lasts for more than a day)...so clearly direct brewery sales are not keeping up w/the volume of beer being brewed at both places. When I was up at HF over xmas break I noticed folks returning empty pin kegs up to the counter --selling kegs for individual consumers hasn't been done since before the expansion I don't think. Still not sure why they'd want to deal w/that hassle but it's very cool nonetheless.

 

Cool and probably more in line with how these great brewers and business owners want THEIR business and life to be. I don't think either of them expected the huge growth that they experienced. As a former small business owner, more and bigger is not always better.
It sometimes takes a while to learn that you need to control your business growth and not let your business growth control you.

 

Well shoot, Luscious is back as is Broken Spoke. Guess I'll be making a trip back to Stowe sooner than anticipated...

 

Haha, so the amount of posts on a thread now indicate how good a brewery is? How about Alchemist being so far ahead of the times that they figured out the way to avoid long lines and still sell all their beer? They make plenty of beer, post what is available and keep the limits manageable...seems to work just fine no matter how many people post this thread about it.

 

Broken Spoke is my second favorite Alchemist beer since the new brewery opened after Skadoosh 5. Also really glad to see Alena pop up so frequently! Big fan of how they've diversified their lineup in the last 6 months.