They follow the same set-up; organised your launch day and venue, limit availability to the wider beer community through geography and volume, sell your beer!
Perhaps nothing new if you are living in the states, where this sort of thing happens quite frequently, but relatively new to the UK. But it is starting to happen more often, off the top of my head Sirencraft Brewery even released a video heralding the release of their Maiden 2014 barley wine. In Ireland, a similar experience can be seen with the release of Galway Bay's 200 Fathoms but not to the same extremes.
So is this type of thing good for the beer market or more importantly the consumer?
From a marketing perspective, no one is reinventing the wheel here and it makes perfect business sense. Generate some hype, limit the stock, raise the price and you are almost guaranteed to shift units. But the product has to be at least good if not great to make it more than a one-off. If the beer is rubbish no one will return, if the beer is good you will be forgiven but probably forgotten, if the beer is great you can create a yearly release where the hype will grow and grow. In the latter case, you will create a great white whale, for the whale hunters in the beer community to go on a quest for. I have been lured into this myself, mainly by Founders KBS, which I finally managed to get a bottle of and may review in the not too distant future.
Photos courtesy of Rick Fortier
This turns my attention to the effect on the beer consumer. A bit of hype generates excitement, creates a bit of buzz in the community and encourages friends to share the odd hard-to-get beer or two. With particular launches, a whole day (for KBS this is a whole week) is set aside including music, food and beer. A bit of community building is never a bad thing, so all good? Well, when you look at it like that, it is hard to see the issue. But one problem is that due to the limited availability not everyone will get the beer, and some of those people will invariably take to the internet to pay large sums of their hard earned cash to obtain these legendary beers at over-inflated prices. Or end up in a very lopsided beer trade. So what? That is their problem if they are willing to pay the price or are willing to trade the beer. But what if the people who are buying up this beer, don't even like the beer and are looking to make a few bucks or use as currency for beer trading. Much like the modern day ticket tout, who I have a deep-seated disliking for, but that is a different story. I suppose that is a moral question for the beer tout and the whale hunter.
Another fallout of all this is hype and legend being built around a beer that isn't actually that great, it is simply just a good beer. Or a beer that was awesome but hasn't moved on, and in amongst the current raft of beers wouldn't even register. Yet queues of people turn out every year to get that one allocated bottle or four pack. You can actually see this happen with Stone Brewing (http://www.stonebrewing.com/) who have taken it upon themselves to admit this with such beers as Ruination IPA which they are stopping production of. This will be replaced by Ruination 2.0 (http://blog.stonebrewing.com/index.php/goodbye-stone-ruination-ipa/) which will up the game for the current market and will ensure the legend continues. Should more breweries follow suit and move with the times, or would that ruin some of the nostalgia for that particular taste people want from that particular beer? File this one under thoughts and musings.
My name is Bruce!
PS) I recently read a similar, if not more eloquent opinion on this by The Beer Nut read it in his post Why beer doesn't matter.
I'll give the white whales this: I've never tasted a bad one.
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