Utopias

~$200 of great beers. or since you are in MA you should be able to find it since people don't always want to shell out the huge price tag for it. totally worth it though.

 

you can always try.

 

If it's 4-6 bottles, you will need more powerful ammo than that IMO.

 

I have a 2007 Utopias I might trade for 6 bottles of Vanilla/Bramble/Cherry Rye (some combo of).

 

If you wanna package 4-6 bottles, they better be $30-$50 a bottle...do the math playboy...KBS, Surly stuff or ZD won't cut it...

 

$4$ of decent stuff will get this done. Utopias is a 10,000+ bottle shelf beer.

 

The prices vary greatly from store to store though as an FYI for the OP.

 

Keep in mind, that same $200-300 bucks could easily get someone a bruery rs membership (that includes bt, cr, others), a trip to dark lord day, or a monster box of cantillon shipped from Europe. All pretty easy things to get were it not for the price, you you probably need to overcome that.

Basically, if you are trying to save money on the deal, I would imagine you will need some pretty heavy hitters. Or better yet, find 3-5 dudes to split it and bite the bullet.

 

I've seen Utopias listed for trade for King Henry+Rare on multiple occasions. That doesn't mean it got done, but sounds about right.

 

I agree in theory, but there's some faulty and/or exaggerated logic here. The Cantillon might be the closest to true. It's certainly the easiest, but I don't know about a "monster" box. Etre Gourmet doesn't currently have any particularly crazy 'loons (LPs, Fou Foune, etc.), and still you're looking at like 6-10 bottles after shipping for your $200-300. If you're looking for those types of bottles or Armand'4's or something (if you're willing to branch out to high end non-'loons), you might get 3 or 4. Actually, yeah, maybe that does qualify as a monster box of 'loons. Certainly doesn't sound bad.

For the Bruery membership, you'll have to pay additional $ for shipping and find someone willing to ship if you don't live in CA. And it's just the few beers that are included with the membership. The other perks require you to spend additional money on other bottles.

DLD (or any other brewery only type release) requires that you live near the brewery or shell out more $ to fly or drive there and probably more still to get a hotel (likely far surpassing your $200-300 budget well before you've bought your first bottle of actual beer). Of course there are plenty of additional perks you can consider that money paying for, but it's a lot more convoluted than "1 bottle of utopias = 1 trip to darklord day". And that's all assuming you're actually lucky enough to get tickets, or win a bottle from a scratch-off, or can get off work early enough to stand in line all day and night, or whatever the limiting factor is at your brewery-only release of choice.

You're right that if money is no object, lots of great beer can be acquired, but that's true for all but the rarest / most obscure stuff. Even a couple bottles of Dave got auctioned off last year for a couple $K per bottle. There's not much that money can't buy in the beer world. Still, the trading forums seem to have their own exchange rates develop, which aren't based solely on $ costs (retail or otherwise). So I don't see why it would be at all unlikely that someone who was able to walk down the street and buy a bottle of Utopias for $200 at their local store wouldn't be willing to trade said bottle for a few beers from various releases in other part(s) of the country or world that someone won tickets to buy, possibly traveled to, stood in line over night, etc., and then paid $100 for, for instance.

Though admittedly, "Cherry Rye, KBS, and surly stuff or ZD" don't qualify.

 

I think that's the main point... Sure the $$ amount kind of flies out the window, but you are basically trading a very expensive shelf beer (limited supply sure, but limited market as well). which means that to trade it, you need to offer things that would take someone about $200-300 in time/effort/beer/cash to acquire, which is of course different things for different people.

My examples were just examples of beer that is highly valued that often price is the barrier to entry, but that in the same ballpark of cost that the OP should consider. I used these because they tend to trade more often/ have a general consensus on "value" (uhg, can't believe i said that), so the OP might get a sense of what he's asking for.

 

Word. Yeah, I got off on a bit of a rant there. I don't post on here very often anymore, and sometimes I get a little carried away when I do.

 

Even if you were not to buy any other beers offered through membership - and that is an option, the beers you get with the subscription to RS make up a fairly solid year long savings that you just essentially paid the price of a futures sales on them.

 

Why in the world would anybody even consider trading for a beer that some searching in Mass. could locate a 10th anniversary Utopias on shelf for 189.00, maybe less. Why would anyone trade multiple bottles that could get limited release stuff for a single shelf bottle? It makes a bit of sense to pay shipping on a single bottle to get multiples, but no sense the other way around.

 

I'm a bit confused as well...

Not sure where you live OP, but it's still floating around if you poke into the less populated suburbs. Nearly every store in MA that sells a decent amount of Sam Adams seems to get a bottle or two for sale every release.

 

You should just post a trade thread then, listing those 4-6 bottles that you'd like to trade for a Utopias. I think that will be an uphill battle if they're along the lines of Cherry Rye, Zombie Dust, Surly stuff, and KBS.

For what it's worth, I traded a 10th anniversary and its glassware voucher for Darkness 2010, 2011, 2x2012, Five, Syx, Pentagram, Steel Toe Lunker, BCBCS, Serendipity, and a Darkness snifter. Both sides were happy as I responded to an ISO.