Undervalued Beers: Rare '15

agree with what you stated in bold. strongly disagree with the under-lined portion. but one must actually pay attention to the way things transpired.

to believe GI reacted as best it could once it detected problems requires us to ignore that that they detected a problem before release with the coffee variant & felt the need to dump a large percentage of it.

that in & of itself is not so bad - it happens like you said to the best of em'. but to later pretend to have no inkling what was going on & stall consumers after they themselves found a large amount of their own product to be unworthy of bottling beforehand, does not strike me as treating their customers with dignity or as if they believe their customers are intelligent.

it wasn't 1 variant. it was one variant after the other.

again. GI knew in advance coffee had a "problem" at the source. they seemed shocked when consumer bottles also had problems. yet, more shocked barleywine also had problems. recap. they knew coffee at the brewery had problems, coffee in consumers' bottles had problems, finally acknowledged barleywine had problems too & then they were dumbfounded people complained the standard release had problems??? these "problems" were all isolated, random, unrelated coincidences...

 

I had infected bottles of BW and BCBCS, but had both on tap and they tasted wonderful. It's definitely possible, then, that Goose might have been sampling liquids (perhaps during QC) that would make their way into the taps, as opposed to the bottles. Thus, it could have been missed in which case they would not have known about it until the news started circulating.

(At least this is what I'd like to believe)

At any rate, they do receive a far worse rap than they deserve, mostly by the far-Left anti-corporate craft beer drinkers who are proud of themselves because they think they're making some sort of a statement by not drinking AB-InBev. To those folk, feel free to send me your BCBS.

Cheers

 

Sorry, didn't want to get into an argument of semantics of pricing and ounces. (it is funny that ounces is always irrelevant when trading) I used to care about a few ounces. But over the years, with the accumulation of beer, it's not a big deal especially if the beer is superior. I always prefer a smaller format, and understand the price might be higher.

I was just illustrating that $20 would be low. I can agree $60 is too much! I could care less how important how Rare a beer is, in regards to the bottle count - 100, 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 . Don't need exclusive beer, that's why I still really enjoy The Bruery. Rare is rated pretty high on untapp'd ( taste is always subjective, but it gives an idea), so it seems it is pretty darn good.

Bottle Logic beers are 500ML, which is about 16.9oz. Heck those Non BA Stouts, are very expensive for what they are.

Been disappointed with Fremont bottles, and even they are expensive. $30 each for rusty nail & unicorn tears in my area. I'd definitely take Rare for $20, over either of those bottles. Don't care for abyss variants or black butte anniversary porter myself.

I hope The regular BCBS will be more readily available this year around. At $10 a pop, I think that's a great deal. Last year I did not want to hunt down stores or stand in lines, and everything sold out quickly. So I missed out completely.

Would love for more breweries to produce 12oz bottles for $5 like oddside. That would make it so much easier to decide what to buy!!!

cheers brother!

 

Yes, let's make a horribly infected bottled beer about left-vs-right, since we don't have enough of that crap in everyday life.

 

Did I go off the rails a bit?

 

GI brewmaster Jared Jankoski stated during the podcast they had seen no evidence of Lactobacillus acetotolerans before the beers went into distribution.

 

to be fair, we can't say they knew there was an "infection" beforehand.

what they did know is there was (some) problem with at least 1 variant & the "off" taste it exhibited prior to release was such that they discarded a large amount of said variant.

but to then repeatedly pretend to be shocked when the general public found problems in variant after variant. sorry but i found these & other acts to be a lot less genuine than they've been allowed credit for.

 

i mean absolutely no disrespect to you here. think about that statement carefully. what else was Jared supposed to say??? "We knew we screwed up"? "We had suspicions but still took a chance?"

also. was it a different Jared & brewmaster who initially stated in that choreographed podcast the contaminant was not believed or known to "spoil" beer? thus indicating even it had been detected, it would have been ignored as a non factor anyway.

so you're telling us now his story is GI checked for something they had no knowledge would cause a problem & went so far as to confirm that this unrealized, mystery spoiler was not present?

 

You are getting dangerously close to sounding like a Roswell resident or one of those anti NASA moon landing folks.

I'm sure you can find flaws in their words, you obviously have with these conclusions, but that doesn't make your interpretation accurate, nor does it mean GI is lying to the public.

Consider the testing that is done on each barrel. How well can in house equipment measure and catch 100's of various lacto strains. They do their best to catch the common ones, but they don't farm out every barrel to a science lab that analyzes all strains and provides a part per billion accuracy. That's just ludicrous given the cost it requires.

Fast forward one year, they bought a flash pasteurizer, because it's so significantly more efficient and cost effective than the alternative.

If you want to fault them, go ahead, but I still maintain they were accurately reporting what they had uncovered over time.

 

bruh you don't know the half of it. i'm out in a thunderstorm now with my tinfoil hat on.

you keep responding with the term lacto to my purposely used term: "PROBLEM". when i say GI knew there was a problem, you appear to read i said : GI knew exactly what the problem was. i don't believe you can point to my saying specifically that. nor that GI specifically "lied" to the public either.

a large portion of the 2015 coffee variant was discarded before the release. the discard occurred because of "Off flavors". please pay attention cause this part is important. "Off flavors" does not = GI knows why or what is causing the off flavors. it does not imply GI knows for sure there is lacto or even any infection present at all.

what the off flavors, in this case, do expose is GI knows something was not right with that portion of the production, & that's what i call (A PROBLEM). based on GI's own actions, prior to release, they knew this problem was significant enough for them to toss a majority of their coffee variant. what some might call a significant "problem".

so i stand by my conclusion. they knew they had some sort of "problem" beforehand. they appeared to try to deal with it but didn't completely succeed. you're arguing from a perspective that assumes there's an implication they knew exactly what the problem was early on. but that's an imaginary detail with no reference.

however. about them later sounding in disbelief when customers reported PROBLEMS... when they already had their own known history with an un-diagnosed problem? it's more like they were "acting" as opposed to "lying".

 

It seems you are basing your entire argument on "a large portion of 2015 coffee was discarded." I think you have an uphill battle. There has only been speculation, the person who says they know a guy, and the chicken littles who's store got less that year.

Numerous people claimed there was a problem with the double cream stout in 2016 Black Note. It went on for months. Then Bell's distributes two difference BN releases later that year. This type of speculation happens over and over. If you buy into it, fine, but I don't.

 

i'll let you go after this because A) i'm not out to convince you of anything & B) you're basically going to go with cartoon characters if anything presented disagrees with you.

here's what i'll leave you with. read through all the related threads on this forum. you'll find numerous random mentions by numerous random Beer Advocate members across numerous regions who attended numerous events on Black Friday & other take-over gatherings; all of whom have the same consistent story. that story was: the reason Coffee had 1 single bottle date & was the hardest to obtain was because GI discarded 60 or more % of it beforehand.

the GI rep at the Black Friday event i hit offered this same story. during SF Beer Week (Feb 2016) there were multiple local events mainly distributing additional Rare & Regal, but the reps & distribution staff present, reiterated this same story.

how i see it. you're insistent GI is honest, forthcoming (or put whatever positive attributes you think fit better). but now you're basically saying, & maybe without realizing it, that GI employs an army & network of unscrupulous "chicken littles" that all got together to formulate some bogus conspiracy theory & simultaneously disseminated it across the country to customers. so which is it. the company of honesty? or the company over-run with Chicken Littles?

 

Lol. That was pretty funny. It's an expression btw.

The BCS threads are filled with speculation, I followed them all the way through. Don't get fooled by it. Same way the black note thread was, and many others to come.

 

Prop also got infected as well.

 

It sounds like someone has a few rare that he'd like to trade.

Rare is still sitting on the shelves in some places. It's so wildly overpriced and there were tens of thousands of bottles. Bottle count is the biggest factor in a beer's "value" because that relates to how many people you can potentially get one from. The more people that have it the less you can offer up because chances are someone will trade it away less than the other person. On the other hand if there are only a few people with said beer you have to offer up more to try to pull it away from someone. All that said, Rare is a good beer. So just drink it if you like it and don't worry about how it trades. If anything you should be happy it trades so low so you can get more and drink it more easily.

 

If we're talking undervalued beers in general, I've got to give some love to a couple of Pennsylvania beers/breweries: Tired Hands saisons and Bullfrog Le Roar Grrrz (non-fruited). Seems like all you get all the hype and trading for Tired Hands IPAs and milkshakes when their saisons are incredible too. I drank an Individuation Florid Dry-Hop the other day that was absolutely stellar. Then for the Grrrz beers, those were trading high a few years ago then seriously fell off the face of the planet. I can't speak to the fruited ones, but the regular "gueuze-style ale" is a delicious super limited beer that should age well and I have no idea why it doesn't get any ISOs anymore.

 

Cycle is over valued. They had a huge hit with Scoop, but many of their BA offerings have been meh.