What do you consider "off-the-shelf?"

A lot of beers in this area (VA/DC) are never put on the shelf. Beers like KBS/CBS and other similar rare brews. In Total Wine (regional chain) you have to ask for them behind the counter. Same at Whole Foods. My local beer place Ricks will post up on facebook, so it's a first come first served basis. This replaced the wait lists which I think make it fairer. They don't discriminate. Obviously it means I've missed out on the hard to get release here and there, but I much prefer everyone have a fair chance at getting these beers, than just a few who sign up way in advance*.

So for me, off the shelf would be something, be it year round or seasonal, that you can go and pick up with relative ease, that actually make it on to the shelf.

*And it's not like there aren't enough great on the shelf beers to choose from if you happen not to pick up the latest greatest sought after brew

 

Actually in the state of Kentucky for the most part it never made it to retail distribution it was on premise only, so it technically never was a off the shelf here.

 

your quoting is messed up, but that's a good approach to the question, nice work.

you should also factor in that 1 out of every 2 threads in the pacific forum are some variant of "whar can i find pliny in san francisco???" and "what's to do in san diego??", so true content is even more sparse...

 

so...where CAN I find pLINnY?

 

i can't argue this. but obviously bruery is more convenient for me.

i don't know about that. i think most people who are really interested in those beers can get them pretty easily - there are enough rs members around (including some probably local to you), and the bottle counts high enough, that you can walk backwards into most of those bottles without trouble. i don't consider them good trade bait. and that shouldn't be the point of the rs anyway.

 

that was my response when people asked for the goandpickitupformebro favors. fly in and get it yourself.

 

p.s. a lot of this is a flaw in people's understanding of how language works.

when i say, "off the shelf locals" you know from context (cultural knowledge, the thread/conversation in which i'm saying it, etc) what i mean. it might mean "beer you can get all year," ie it might exclude not only things like KH and KBS, but even pliny and lunch (sell out quickly), or pumking (seasonal). it might mean "non-brewery-only release," and if it means that, it will probably be clear from other stuff the speaker said.

trying to pin down a universal meaning to it is misunderstanding language. each linguistic form that we use is a versatile tool shaped by context. on one utterance, it can mean the exact opposite of what it does on another.

notice, in the exchange devi0us described, if he were being sincere when he "reminded" the OP that KH was "off the shelf," all this indicates is that he was willfully misunderstanding what the OP meant by "off-the-shelf trade." he obviously did not mean "beer that was at some point in its lifetime on a shelf," (but he could have meant exactly that in a different context!).

communication breaks down when the utterance you use is just entirely the wrong tool for the job. while a screwdriver has many uses, there are some things it can't do very well or at all (say, hammer nails). sometimes the speaker might throw out "off-the-shelf" and nobody will know what he means. this isn't because the phrase is misleading, it's because the speaker chose a bad tool, or is generally bad at communicating.

[the last paragraph is included to tell the full story of 'off-the-shelf'. in short, you use your accumulated cultural knowledge and understanding of context to make sense of any given utterance of 'off-the-shelf'. as many of you realize, the beer trading world is full of many people who assume they have more cultural knowledge than they actually do, so sometimes their use of words will be aberrant, exactly because their understanding of linguistic context will be different than that of the people to whom they talk. habeesh?]

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tl;dr: no tl;dr. read it if you're interested in semantics.

 

Not sure what happened, although I am sure it was user error. Re-posting with the quote fixed.

Well my non-scientific way of measuring this is to look at the number of threads created here on BA for the regional forums. If BA activity roughly translates to the number of nut-job beer geek consumers then the numbers are roughly as such.

The Great Lakes forum (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio) has roughly 1,300 discussions and 25,000 replies.
The Mid-Atlantic and New England forums combined to roughly approximate the eastern seaboard has about 1,400 discussions and 22,000 replies.
The Pacific and Northwest forums have about 1,000 and 17,000.

When you compare overall population density, the east coast has more that twice as many people as the Great Lakes and the west coast and great lakes are about the same.

That translates (by my thread creation comparison) to a 50% higher density of BA's in the Great Lakes area vs the East coast and a roughly 30% high density than the West Coast.

Disclaimer: This could be total bullshit, but was the only way I could think to come up with a comparison without doing actual work. The numbers could also get thrown off by cross posting in other forums or by a few very active BAs that skew numbers.

 

Since he lumped the Northwest forum in there, true content goes even further down since 75% of all queries in the NW section are about what to do in Portland.

 

I don't think everyone is doing that. I have posted my non-BT Bruery RS beers for trade looking for Kuhnhenn Meads and vintage DFH stuff. I am not asking anything crazy for mine, and if nobody would have been interested I would have been ok with that. I will probably put them out there for some regular NG beers next, and again if nobody would be interested that is fine with me. I have seen other reasonable Bruery ISO posts. I will admit that a few people still try to trade them for far more than they are worth, but I think they are starting to figure it out.