Barrel Aged Old Numbskull & Kopi Luwak Speedway Stout Bottle Sale

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Barrel Aged Old Numbskull & Kopi Luwak Speedway Stout Bottle Sale

Our first Reserve Series release of 2013 will be Barrel Aged Old Numbskull and our first ever bottling of Kopi Luwak Speedway Stout. A little information about each of these beers:

Barrel Aged Old Numbskull is our award winning American Barleywine Ale matured in premium bourbon barrels for up to one year to develop it's rich intense flavor profile. This beer has not been released since 2010.

Kopi Luwak Speedway Stout is our award winning year round Speedway Stout with Kopi Luwak Coffee. Considered one of the world's most expensive and rare coffee varieties, the beans are specifically selected for their ripeness and quality by the civet, a small jungle marsupial that feeds of the fruit of the coffee cherry. Expertly roasted by San Diego's Ryan Bros. Coffee leads to an extremely aromatic and exceptionally smooth final product that complements Speedway Stout exceptionally well! Good to the last dropping!

Starting January 15th,you will be able to purchase up to four (4) bottles of Barrel Aged Old Numbskull and up to four (4) bottles of Kopi Luwak Speedway Stout and your name will be registered (you will need to use your name for each bottle). Any duplicate sales to the same name will be voided! We want to make this as fair as possible and get as many bottles into our wonderful customer's hands!

Please USE ONLY YOUR NAME TO PURCHASE THE BOTTLES. YOUR PURCHASE IS JUST FOR YOUR BOTTLES.

Bottles can be picked up starting Saturday, January 19th in the AleSmith Tasting Room. Bottles can be retrieved during tasting room hours from January 19th through Sunday, March 10th (Tue/Wed/Thur: 2-8pm, Fri: 2-9pm, Sat: 11am-8pm & Sun: 11am-6pm.) Any bottles not retrieved by SUNDAY, MARCH 10TH will be surrendered back to the brewery.

Please DO NOT PURCHASE BOTTLES UNLESS YOU CAN MAKE IT TO THE BREWERY BY MARCH 10TH, 2013.

Proxies will not be allowed for this release, you will need to show your proof of purchase (in the form of CONFIRMATION EMAIL FROM BROWN PAPER TICKETS) and valid id to retrieve your bottles. NO EXCEPTIONS WILL BE MADE. This means you will NOT be able to pick up anyone else's bottles, and we will not release the bottles to you without a confirmation and valid id matching the name on the sale!

Please ensure you only pick up bottles during the following dates/times: Tue/Wed/Thur: 2-8pm, Fri: 2-9pm, Sat: 11am-8pm & Sun: 11am-6pm. Please do not purchase bottles until you've read the terms and conditions listed below and can ensure you will be able to pick up your bottles by SUNDAY, MARCH 10TH, 2013!

To purchase tickets, please visit our Brown Paper Tickets sale page located here. The page will not go live until twelve (12) prior to the start of bottle sales! For more information about our release party celebration, see below.

Sale time just reduced from 3 minutes to 2.5 seconds! BUY! BUY! BUY!

I guess it's OK though, didn't have a shot in hell myself anyways.

The BA Speedway sale lasted at least a few hours, and the BA Wee Heavy sale lasted all day. The only catch is that the Brown Paper Tickets web site doesn't seem to work that well with a lot of mobile devices.

Though I don't hate you for posting this, I can sympathize with those who inevitably will (unless of course the bottles are a cinch to purchase in which case you're just a friendly spreader of wealth).

Wow, surprising.


Wait, silly me, I read the thread subject as "Phish Tickets Sale"

The "no proxies" rule seems to keep these from being a complete shitshow, and if the batch sizes are anything like BAWH, there will be plenty to go around. All the same, I wouldn't have minded if someone hadn't posted it within 14 minutes of the newsletter going out...

You were the first to break the news! Right on, bro!

Yeah - it isn't even on their Facebook page yet.

<-- has a desk job and has nothing better to do than look at BA all day...

One could speculate that much of the reason these sales went so smoothly had to do with the fact that people abstained from starting threads about them on beeradvocate (at least not until the last minute with BA speedway if I remember correctly).

Posting in threads like this that there are plenty of bottles to go around when threads like this appear to increase demand and make the bottles tougher to get is a tad bit ironic.

There were threads about both BASS and BAWH before the release. The only way to achieve a quiet release at this point is to do what Alpine does - put something up for sale on a Wednesday morning and send out the newsletter when it's already for sale.

On I thought I was on BeerAdvocate

BeerAdvocate (BA) is a global, grassroots network, powered by an independent community of beer enthusiasts and industry professionals who are dedicated to supporting and promoting beer.

Either way...*Cheers

Keep it secret, keep it safe, bro.

It's nice to see AleSmith on track with the regular BA releases. There was a pretty long lull there last year.

Yeah, it would certainly be more helpful to the beer community if you didn't post these threads, brah. Don't you know that we have to keep all the news suppressed in fear that people would actually know a beer is being released?

sheeeeeeeesh

I think the point is just that it will sell out regardless of whether it makes it on BA before the release and people hype it up. So the only impact of posting it here early is to make it more difficult for everyone who follows AleSmith and already knows about the release.

The past two releases have gone smoothly, so maybe it doesn't matter. But it's hard to tell.

Does it increase demand? Sure, but these sales are restrictive enough in nature that I don't think it blows it out of the water. I just wish I had pulled the trigger on the Decadence 2010.

The fact that you can't use a proxy goes a long way in self regulating how crazy it will be. I think it's going to go smoothly. We have come a long way since 09 BA Speedway.

The one on BASS was posted less than 60 mins before the onsale, and I dont even recall a thread on the wee heavy release.

Obviously we can't control factors enough to conduct a scientific study here, but BASS '09 was a fustercluck of epic proportions, and it had a thread 100 responses deep several days prior to its release. I think we can be beer advocates without being fustercluck advocates. Maybe there's a website out there for people who desire that sort of thing, though a google search would probably give your computer all sorts of viruses.

As for alpine, I thought they mitigated oversized demand for their barrel aged releases via infection issues, which was very clever and savvy of them.

One would think...and yet there are inevitably threads about every limited release and people asking how early they should arrive, discussions about having massive bottle shares before/during/after events loaded with high gravity beers, and a trading culture that has become pseudo-eBay. Not every BA is guilty of any or all of these things, but if you look at BA as a whole now vs. a year ago, two years ago, or five years ago, it's safe to say that BA and the way its users approach beer releases and events is more of a clusterfuck than ever.

I'm not cynical enough to believe that it's all the fault of people who are new to the hobby, far from it in fact, but BA as a whole has played both positive and negative roles in the growth of craft beer.

You think this is the only beer talk on the internet? The moment the newsletter went out I saw post over on reddit and various other communities that talk about beer.

The Brown Paper Bag ticketing means that if you want to bring a mule into this, they have to be committed in buying it on their card and going down with you.

The restrictive purchasing requirements on this prevent it from turning into a shit show and it should last a bit of time online before selling out because of those limitations.

But don't just assume that keeping it secret on here will make it any easier to get. If anything it'll just limit how many Beer advocate folks heard it here.

The Kopi Speedway isn't barrel aged. / 50% interest declining right there.

'09 Speedway was a nightmare because they released it during NHC.

Don't get too upset - it's awesome watching the elitist assholes squirm every time someone "outs" something like this.

Noob bandwagoners are going to do what they do. That's just what happens on the internet (like all those threads where people ask strangers what they should be drinking right now.)

Sick burn

ISO Kopi Luwak Speedway!! If anyone is going to be going to the Younger Release on the 9th, I would be very interested in a Kopi Speedway.

I was at the AleSmith Tasting Room on Thursday. They were selling the BA Wee Heavy off the shelf. Bottleworks and Clems also got some bottles.

though i typically don't like spilling the beans on special releases (as can be seen in the BASS release thread) I have a feeling this beer will last a while. It isn't because i don't like sharing beer, it is because i know the beer will sell out and that it is easy to get the info, just join the mailing list and stop waiting for others to do the work for you. So announcing a limited high demand beer release is not going to help the beer sell out or allow more people to get it, it will just add more people rushing to get it.

I am not shocked the Alesmith releases are lasting a while, as I remember the look on Peter's face during the 09 BASS release, you can tell he had a look of "never again". Even though there were people who were complete assholes to him, he always kept his cool and was very nice. Alesmith has always been one of my favorite breweries, after seeing his reactions and seeing the steps they have made on these releases they are now easily my favorite.

Wouldn't be the Pacific subforum without a butthurt Alpine complaint post.

What exactly happened at this release?

Long ass lines mainly. They dropped allocations from 4 (or was it 6) per person to 2 a few days before, then down to 1 per person part way through the release. The release started at 9am i believe, I got there at 8am and there were 200 people in front of me. The release was during the week during the National Homebrew Conference, so a lot of people in line were out of staters use to an earlier time zone and had no work to go to. Alesmith's previous release methods were, stand in line, pay and get a ticket, then come back a few hours later and get bottles. So for this release it meant two lines, each taking about 3 hrs. So for people after the first 100 or so, you had to stay in line for about 4-7 hours and got 1 bottle.

ohhh and line cutters an homeless mules

Some people showed up at 4am, though the ten plus group of theirs didn't show up till 8am, so when you thought you were 94 in line, you found out that you just became 210 in line when all the mules finally were in the line.

And yeah, it was a double line. A sort of "here's the tickets, now come back in an hour to pick it up" sort of situation.

And line cutters and hired bums standing in line for someone (seriously) and people getting hostile when others called them out for line cutting. Not to mention people's grandmas, old people dressed up for church, apparent non-beer geeks, etc. It certainly didn't look like the crowd from Darklord Day, nor an international craft beer sideshow at a county fair.

I showed up at about 7:30. There was about 150 people in front of me. However, when the release started at 9am there was almost 300 (I walked the line and counted both times).

Yep. 4 bottles at first, down to 2, down to 1.

I can't agree with this enough. I've never seen peter be anything less than awesome and polite.

...
The releases were always pretty low-key until the 2009 BA Speedway release. 2006 release had something like 265 bottles and I just cruised up there on a lunch break and got a bottle. Same with '07 BA Decadence. Easy peasy. After the 2009 release I swore them off as far as releases. But now\ they perform online sales and I love it. paired with bigger releases, it leaves a lot more people satisfied.

Butthurt? Thought it was a damn amusing crack because of that element of truth.

BTW, how soon can we reasonably 'out' the Churchill's Finest Hour release?

Why would we want to?

Is the Kopi Speedway a different recipe altogether, or is it regular Speedway with a different type of coffee?

damn with all of that music and effects it felt like I was watching some sci-fi gore movie

Weasel Shit Speedway Stout. If they named it that I would have had 10 mules ready at noon instead of 2.

Squirming elitists. Just can't get enough of 'em.

But speaking of clusterfucks, I thought the CHF release last March was pretty well controlled. Saw almost zero line cutting and the like.

This'll be my first time attending. I'm certainly no elitist, I'm just wary of blowing up events on BA (not that it won't happen anyway).

It's funny that this is an issue, because it shouldn't be. Nearly every single BA I have met has been really cool. If the line truly blows up with 200 people from BA, shouldn't that be some kind of big ass party? Not some competitive jealousy-infused clusterfuck rage line.