Tips for hosting a bottle share/tasting

Meeting up in a hotel sounds soooooo creepy. Just have it at your house, bro!

 

Haha this thread is awesomely funny.

I find bottle shares with strangers is hit or miss. Sometimes you just don't jive with certain people, I'm sure I annoy a lot of people too with my corny jokes and loud ass voice. Until they hear me bust a freestyle of course.
Hosting it are your house is...well a risk with strangers for some of the reasons mentioned above.

The best bottle shares I've attended were the ones with close friends, some friends which I've met at bars. Stranger shares sometimes have a weird vibe, some people are too worried about rarity, others are just bragging the whole time about this beer and that beer showing you pictures from old shares, but then you meet people you click with and make new beer friends too. So double edged sword.

 

Have hosted many Christmas Ale tastings and various bottle shares at my home and some outback at the bonfire. I have also attended a few that were held at a local dive bar.
All have gone off without any major issues.
Tons of GREAT beer and lots of fun

 

I host a monthly beer round in the Dallas area with an assortment of people. I have found limiting the tasting to a style and around 6-9 participants works best. The pours usually are 3-5oz and I break it up half-way for a meal that pairs with the beer style. Focusing the conversation around the ATSMO kept the personal confrontation to a minimum. Been about a year now so seems to work well.

Cheers

 

Tastings with strangers can be odd. Had a couple bigger/open ones split -- people that had brought bottles they considered "too special" to share with everyone and took off for the ELITE tasting.

Also gets hard to scale up when you might only have 375ml or less of something special (I'm looking at you Fuzzy) that everyone wants to try.

 

If you have a local craft bar that opens late on Sundays, hit them up to have a closed door party Sunday morning with a minimal catered food thing. A couple bucks each to cover the employee - at least see them end up with $50 or so, pitch in with busing the tables and you get the appropriate glassware to use.

 

A bit off topic, but I enjoy the stranger shares quite a bit. Living in Las Vegas we get quite a few out of towners and I have met my best trade partners through these events. It is also fun telling my wife/family/co-workers that I am off to a random hotel to drink beer in a dudes hotel room.

 

Best tasting I have ever been to had the following rules/qualities

1. Met in a friends basement and all sat around a ping pong table with the net taken off
2. Everyone was asked to bring 2 bombers of stuff that wouldnt get made fun of. Everyone one had to be funny or one up each other so the average was probably 3 bombers per person and some guy brought a tallboy of Chilada (it was a blind tasting...)
3. I was walking distance from home. Blowups/couches were ready for the rest.
4. Dump bucket as well as drinking water was available all over the place.
5. Break for pumpkin pie in the middle (did I mention this was thanksgiving night?)


Follow all 5 of these rules and I will personally guarantee success. If you invite me, I will even be the asshole with the tallboy of Chilada ready to crash on your couch.

 

No new friends!

 

One suggestion for type of bottles:

Try not to bring too many Whalez. Have 2-3 Whalez with enough other good beer to get everyone feeling nice. If you have 4+ Whalez, you're taking away from the greatness of each bottle and are basically getting too drunk to notice toward the end.

Less is more.

 

I've hosted 6 bottle shares now starting last summer either in the club room or on the huge rooftop at my apartment building in Arlington, VA. It's metro accessible so while some people drive, many people get a ride or metro over. I've learned to cap the number at around 20, because a couple shares ago we had 25+ and it broke out into two separate groups limiting what you got to taste.

These things have become so epic being able to try so many beers I thought I never would (Heady (there's always a couple cans of at these things), Abyss, Tequila Sucre, Lindley Park, Good Gourd, Mexican Cake, Hunapuh, the list goes on ). I have a couple pitchers of water available with a sink (club room) or hose (rooftop) nearby and a couple solo cups because someone usually forgets to bring a glass. I'll also have some classic rock playing for background noise.

I don't remember the original thread, but I gauged interest in hosting a share and the response was pretty positive so I put up a thread on here and on a beer facebook group I'm apart of that was created by some guys who were on a Belgian Beercation with us, with along with the Alstrom bro's.

There have been a share of people who have only come to one share, but there definitely are many repeat customers if they aren't out of town. And it's always fun to run into someone who has come to the shares out at a local beer bar.

Here are links to the few past ones to get an idea of the banter that goes on. I'm having one in a couple weeks but the mods deleted the thread instead of the single post I asked them to.

http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...larendon-arlington-saturday-06-21-3pm.183816/
http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...on-arlington-sat-april-12-2pm-rooftop.156463/
http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...-in-clarendon-arlington-sat-02-08-3pm.143706/

Let me know if you have any more questions.

 

Completely agree, by the end you are too tipsy to really appreciate them like they should be. I tried to insert the really top shelf stuff a little early so that people can really enjoy them.

 

Small snack-type foods are nice to have. Chips/crackers, cheese, maybe summer sausage. Nothing too crazy, though, don't want to kill the palate.

 

I'm a terrible beer. I've been accused of being bitter, sour, acerbic, sweet AND somehow unbalanced. At least I am not too malty.

 

We have bottle shares at least once a month in Denver. Started off as a bunch of people who didn't know anyone, now good friends. Water pitchers/dump buckets, snacks (popcorn, pretzels, cheese/meat plates) and plenty of tasting glasses are always appreciated. We usually have it at someone's house, but have also had it at a restaurant who was gracious enough to let us use their space and provide appetizers (generous tipping of the waitstaff, of course!).