Chocolate rain is coming back for sale!

I've never owned a bottle of Melange 1, and i did say i liked them all!

 

In fact, this release was an example of why a hoarder membership is not worth it. The advantages of double allocation has been negated on the CR and Bois variants. Luau's and extra parties are also negated by the amount of clusterforks. There has not been a real advantage at all. Melange 8 and Confessions are not epic beers by any means. Cheers to being an RS

 

Not everyone can taste the rarity.

 

As an rs only member, sitr w/ peaches seemed like a nice early advantage.

 

You're right the Sitr w/peaches was nice. Tried it at the Bruery. I think the hoarders came with 2 and 3 to buy. Still, not quite a wow factor for people that are considered their higher grossing customers. If they created the membership to truly show that they appreciate their customers, it'll take more than that. Committing to a $300 vs. $700 membership, RS seems like a better deal.

 

Most* people are probably splitting a Hoarders membership and you do get 20% off allocations (vs. 15%). If splitting, then HS is defeinitely the better deal. If solo, well, you've gotta pay to play.

In addition to SitR/P, HS was also offered Griffon Brux first. There are certainly other beers in the pipelines that RS members will be interested in that are not going to be allocated to us.

Quick question that I didn't see covered yet:

How many of the Bois variations were Hoarders first allocated?

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*I made this up.

 

we we're allowed 4 of each of the variants..

 

not quite sure i agree with that statement.. i could see how yesterday "negated" the double allocations of there was enough for all of the RS members to get maybe even 2 more bottles, but the numbers do not support that.. @600 bottles of CR available (and lets be honest, as much as I like the Bois variants we're really talking about CR here) there wasnt enough for all RS members, let alone HS members to guarantee 1 extra bottle for everyone.. while I do think that having no limit was a bad idea, its not out of jealousy or the feeling of "man this totally nullifies the whole reason for joining HS!", from past experiences I knew it was cause a customer relations issue.. the either site has always crashed in the past for BT releases and i'm convinced it always will until I see other wise.. now.. BT is gonna be interesting.. after RS and HS have bought their allocations, the rest go on sale to the general public.. i doubt there will be an email sent out allowing for more pre-purchases for BT, they'll just get rolled into whats available for everyone else to buy

TL : DR - even though more bottles have been released to RS than were originally allocated, i have not been disappointed with my membership


cheers

 

I see it differently and would take a HS membership in a heartbeat, just sayin.

 

Was anybody able to order more than 1 bottle of CR?

 

Perhaps their website management leaves much to be desired, but when you have a bunch of people complaining that they were *only* able to buy $175 (RS) or $350 (HS) of your $35 per bottle beer, I don't see how you could be anything but extremely pleased with how things are going with your business.

The funniest thing about the RS is that we (including myself) have to fight the desire to feel like we have to buy as much of the good stuff (not talking about Smoking Wood here) as they are able to allocate or otherwise make available.

It's always funny when they give you the opportunity to be buy like $500 worth of beer in one month and you see people on here fretting about how financially stressed they're going to be after buying all the beer, as if they don't have the option to simply buy one bottle or none even. It can be very liberating to simply keep your credit card in your pocket and drink one of the other 300 bottles we have sitting in our cellars, er, garages and closets.

For those of you who got shut out, a lot of fun can be had with $35.

 

Maybe

 

Only managed to get 3 before they sold out...

 

same. ISO: your HS membership FT: bolt cutter

 

People just like to whine and complain. Some things never change. The bruery did nothing wrong here, and they shouldn't be spending a penny on website upgrades. Some people are just silly.

 

The same mob rush site crash happens every year in October when Black Tuesday goes on sale to the masses. Sorry to those who could not score an extra bottle of CR, but it's still preferable to waiting in line outside a brewery for hours only to not get a bottle.

 

I disagree that the Bruery did nothing wrong, and not because I was affected - I wasn't even trying to buy any more Chocolate Rain.

What they did wrong is expect a system to hold up that they probably knew only had a marginal chance of holding up. It's obvious that breweries don't want to invest in systems that can handle considerable amounts of concurrent traffic, and I don't blame them - whether you go with a solution that can handle that amount of traffic 24/7, or a cloud-based solution with elasticity, there's cost both in the resources and the expertise to deploy it. I wouldn't expect a non-technical business to start investing their profits into technical resources, it doesn't make much sense.

Instead, figure out a non-technical solution to the problem. Do a lottery for the opportunity to buy extra bottles among HS/RS members, this can be accomplished in under a minute if you have the list of members in front of you on a computer. Sure, people would still complain about getting shut out, but I know I'd much rather get shut out after putting forth no effort than get shut out after sitting in front of my computer for a half hour.

Edit for clarity; I'm not saying that people should crucify the Bruery for expecting the Chocolate Rain sale to not crash their server. What I'm saying is that at some point, popular breweries need to take some accountability for how they do online releases, because it's clear that the same problems continue to happen.


Tangential to that, this whole situation makes me really glad that Melange #3 is my favorite Bruery beer...

 

Justification is easy for either side. If you joined HS you justify it by saying you get twice the beer and a bigger discount, as well as a few exclusives. If you were not invited or decided not to join, you can say I did not want twice the beer, and the exclusives are meh. If you are a RS member and maxed out you CR and then tried to buy more last night but left frustrated, sorry. Me, I am happy with the amount of CR I have and had no desire or need to fight the Internet for more CR last night.

 

I don't know man, I thought Melange 8 was pretty fucking epic.