Goose Island 25th Anniversary Party: Just saw this pop up on Facebook...

Napa County Stout is absolutely effing incredible. Best variant I've tasted that hasn't been bottled

 

When did they add Vanilla? It was never on that list!

 

Looks like what they had at Great Taste last year. They were are regular BCS barrels, but specific ones that characterized the flavors of Vanilla, Chocolate, Smoke, and Bourbon.

 

Just get a ticket and go drink as many as you can. It's not "crap". Who knows you might get Rare and vanilla BCS. Your not entitled to anything.

 

Looks like around 1600 tickets sold so far out of 2000.

 

Vanilla won't be there (unless in some surprise way). As Mjmoser indicated the photo is from the barrel blending event but that's not what they're doing tomorrow.

 

This mile long line to get in leads me to believe this is going to be a well run event.

 

Classic Sh*tshow

 

total shitshow. only managed to grab a couple destihl sours before the lines got completely nuts. didn't even bother getting in the goose line. why did they put all the goose stuff in one shitshow location when they had extra tents at the end? also overheard someone saying goose sold 3k tickets. it would have still been a shitshow at half that.

edit: my group bailed after an hour.

 

Just far too many people, plain and simple.

 

Doors opened at noon. I arrived at 11:50. Took 50 minutes to get inside, then took 20 minutes to get beer tickets....only to spend yet another 40 minutes to get a 4oz sample of BCS. We left after an hour of fighting crowds for even the guest drafts.

Rare BCS kicked in 30 minutes before the vast majority even got in the doors

Love Goose but this will make me think twice on going to another of their street fests.

 

Seriously - how many beer events like this is it going to take for someone to figure out to split the rare beers up into multiple areas and make people choose what to go after (giving more people a chance at them)?

Total shitshow - glad I got in early enough to grab some other beers before the place got out of hand. Much more chill here at Haymarket.

 

Not sure how anyone could have thought this would be anything other than a shitshow. It's at least 2000 people on a block after the same beers. This had clusterfuck written on it from the start.

 

Huge thanks to Lansman for the ticket.

Rare, KH, BCBCS, Destihl, Solemn Oath, and it goes on...

 

People were trying to compare this to the 312 Block Party from last year which had the same amount of people. Unfortunately that party lasted all night while this was only 3 hours. The short time constraints caused everyone and their mom to hit the rare stuff first which cause long lines at everything people wanted. I have no idea why they chose to A) do this on a Sunday and B) host for three hours total. I'm glad I didn't end up going as I was feeling pretty shit this morning and 95% of the people I would have gone with left early to attend other events. Inclusion for everyone is what GI was probably going for with this event, but capping this event at 1,000 or 1,500 people would have been sufficient.

 

Even if they didn't sell out they just made a huge amount of money and considering many people left early they didn't have to tap into nearly as much resources.

 

Ya I couldn't take the crowd....left early with only 5 punches on my punch card. Yes I knew it would be a shitshow but jeez... didn't even bother waiting in the 1 hour line for the bcbs variants. Came home and cracked a bottle of king henry for myself to makeup for the shitshow.

 

A huge amount? Hardly, at least not in terms of their normal company-wide revenue. Drop in the bucket.

 

Got there at 11 and had positioning in line that enabled me to grab a rare. I bailed out of that barrel line soon after because it was just insane and too many people were waiting. I'd say I had the deck stacked in my favor for a great time and even I thought it was too much of a mess to deal with. I hit Haarket around 2. Great decision.

 

i left with only three. breweries started tapping out - i think 18th street, church street, and off color were gone in the first hour. i only imagine that destihl tapped out of their sours in about the same timeframe.

big ups to lansman and totallyhosed for giving me tastes of rare and kh, respectively, which made the event less shitty.

i know a lot of times people will say "entitlement much?" when they hear people complaining about events or bottle releases for one reason or another, but those people did not attend this event. i would have been perfectly happy with guest stuff or fulton and wood alone, but the fact that you had to wait in the same 1 hour line as you did for bcbs variants made me, like a lot of others, totally bail after an hour having used some miniscule fraction of their punch card.

GI should be ashamed of themselves for how grossly this event was oversold.