since no one is taking leadership in the other thread, i'm just starting a placeholder. discuss allocations, worship at patrick rue's feet, etc. i'm expecting vacax to be all over this one.
I heard St. Patrick's Day is actually named after Patrick Rue. Cannot confirm or deny, but this is what I'm hearing.
Did they already sell through the initiation tickets, or not for sale yet... Thinking of going out. need to pick up the rest of my allocation from last year anyway.
That's primarily what the Clusterfork events are right? Bottle-shares? This is my first year as an RS member.
I believe so, but have not been to a Clusterfork. But I can definitely tell you that the initiation does not have a bottleshare. And, based on my experience, doing one there would be batshit insane. So much beer...
Yup, Clusterforks are generally bottle shares. You probably don't want to do a bottle share at the initiation party as there's plenty of 18%+ -bal goodness to keep even a chronic alcoholic satisfied.
Don't you know you're banned to the Outer Rim breweries? Begone to Off the Tracks and Wet'nWreckless!
Any veterans of the RS want to chime in on which RS party I should go to if I am only going to fly from NYC for one? The initiation party? A clusterfork? Something else that I don't know about?
Actually, I was underwhelmed last year. There weren't nearly enough taster tickets per person, and you couldn't buy more. I definitely could've used 5 more tickets - I left that place with a mild buzz and a feeling that I missed quite a bit.
How many Chocolate Rains should I expect to be able to purchase as part of a RS membership (besides the one that comes with the membership)?
if you're only coming to one I would recommend the Initiation Party, The Barrel Aged Party, the Anniversary Party or the Black Tuesday Party. The cluster forks are fun and totally worth it (I went to every one last year), but the other parties are a notch above. The Cluster Forks are like giant bottle shares with a couple specialty beers on tap, but they tend to break out the rarer beers at the other parties. I live 4 miles away so I pretty much do them all, but if I was travelling I'd focus on the one's I singled out. Just be warned they're also the most popular. The BT release and BA Party both sold out quick... like minutes quick.
If you can even get in. Those tickets go fast. And without spill over space at provisions, this makes for even harder to get tickets
The Barrel Aged beer party both in 2012, & 2011 was better then the much better organized 2012 intiation, as well as the Clusterfuck that the 2011 intiation was. However, I did still enjoy all of them. Attended about 4 Clusterforks in 2011, but none in 2012, however they were always fun. Being a Hoarder member now myself, I'm looking forward to what events they plan.
I liked the BT dinner pairing better. Really? Everyone I knew ended up with extra tickets and at the end they were pouring without taking tickets. I went away pretty blitzed.
The boys and I are sharing a membership. Looking to put our shipment on hold until march to just get a big box including the Chocolate Rain. Wish we could make the initiate parties. Looking forward to some goodies showing up to my door.
Fair enough. I enjoyed the BT dinner thing, since it was more relaxed, but the Initiation Party just had so much more on tap. I agree about the extra tickets. Our group had quite a few extras by the end. For me, the problem was having enough time to enjoy all the pours in the 2 hour time frame (or however long it was, I forget). I guess the moral of the story is: if you run out, just beg strangers for more.
Yeah, if the thing had been 4 hours long it would've been more of an issue that there were limited tickets. Then again I got to try pretty much everything I wanted to try, so it might have been fine either way. Anywho, I enjoyed myself, but not so much that I'll be racing to go again this year, it probably won't work out.
Yeah. By the time I left a lot of the other beers I wanted to try were gone or near gone (I left probably half an hour before the event was over.) I wasn't with a big group, and I can drink, so that probably didn't help things. It was a pretty solid event but they should allow sales of additional tasters after a couple of hours. It also would've been nice to have another food option besides BBQ.
Depends on what you want out of the events. At the Barrel tasting event, they had every vintage of EVERY BA'd beer they have produced. You could get together with few buddies and do some verts to see how things are shaping up. I don't recall much of that at the Initiation Party. But at the initiation party it's pretty much all the Saison Rue you can drink! And the Barrel Tasting could not brag about that. Plus the Initiation party was like $50 and the BA party was like $30.
Not to nitpick, but the Barrel Party didn't have a few of the BA beers they've produced (BA Partridge, BA Levud's, maybe a couple others), but yah you're right that they had pretty much every BA beer they'd ever made. As far as the Initiation Party, it wasn't like it was LA's Track Release party with unlimited Red Barn and Devo. They had different vintages of Black Tuesday and Choc Rain, as well as BA 2TD, BA Coton and Cuir, as well as several of their sours, including a couple that haven't made it to bottles. IMO, I'd pick the Initiation Party or the Barrel Party. But it seems like last year the Barrel Party was kind of a "oh I guess we have to do one, even though we weren't really planning on it" kind of thing, and I'm wondering if that is something that's going to be dropped in the future. The BT party is hit-or-miss whether you get tickets or not, so I wouldn't make plans in advance to come to town for that one in case you don't get tickets in time. Clusterforks are great, but they only have a couple/few rarities on tap for those, and I think it's more about the bottle-share than anything.
Yeah the selection was great - it was just too bad you couldn't try all of them on one person's ticket allocation! Here's the taplist from last year: barrel aged 2 turtle doves barrel aged autumn maple barrel fermented autumn maple batch 300 batch 50 bierbauch black tuesday burly gourd chocosaurus rye coton cuadruplé cuir gunga galunga iso:ft marrón acidifié melange 1 melange 3 mischief gone wild papier premiere run bmc saison de lente 2010 salt of the earth smoking wood (rye barrel) smoking wood (bourbon barrel) snicklefritz sour in the rye tart of darkness white oak mother funkier acer quercus carmen w/ kiwi carmen w/ pomegranate chocolate rain eider’s folly humulus lager iniquitous loakal red old richland otiose oude tart oude tart w/ sour cherries sans pagaie firkin: sour in the rye w/ kumquats firkin: bourbon smoking wood w/ bacon
At the end of the day, you're gonna come out a winner from attending either party. And they are so spread out, attend both!!!!!!!!
I agree with this. Yeah, I'd say both the intiation, and the barrel party, being so spread out, are the two that are the best for your money to experience. However, with all this said in this thread, if you want to come to CA only once in the year, and have a great event, go to the Firestone Walker invitational in June. The Bruery was there last year pouring quite a few good offerings, in addition to many other amazing breweries. Unlimited pours, unlimited food, unlimited water, 4 hours, etc. The best paid event I've ever attended... exclamation point ("period" just wasn't dramatic enough) and the bottle shares the night before, and after the event, epic.
This perfectly captures the genius of Patrick Rue: getting people to spend $700 for the privilege of buying twice as many $35 beers as those suckers who paid only $300 for the privilege of buying his incredibly expensive beer. I think it's safe to say that those of us involved in this sort of thing have been dealt a very good hand of cards in life.
while i did lol, i find it fascinating that people lamented the scarcity of bruery beers 3 years ago but are so dismissive of his beer now that quantity* went up. re: the "privilege" of buying beers, it's almost like people think only waiting in line for something validates its quality. hell yes i'm happy with the convenience of shopping in my underwear. *and, i'd argue, quality - at least for black tuesday, fruet, melange no. 3. i find it's worth joining just to get massive quantities of those beers alone.
Agreed on all counts. I’m just afraid of tallying up the money I spend on RS purchases in a given year and in complete awe that the bruery has pulled off such an amazing revenue generation machine. Surely, the titans of corporate America would love to integrate this concept into their capitalist exploits if only they could figure out a way. Indeed, we get the spoils of absurdly delicious (and expensive) beer, and the considerable benefit of easy access, but nonetheless an extraction tube has been hooked up to our wallets that can easily suck out anywhere from 2-5% of our annual salaries. It’s almost like tithing, though obviously better since the opium of our masses is real and imbibed in this life, as opposed to promised in the next life which, with fingers crossed, many people await with high (if mistaken) hopes. And I do not mean this as an attack on the bruery, which I happily and wholeheartedly tithe in order to partake in the delicious blood of the beer gods.
Ryan, you get your own membership? Last year it was 2 bottles with 1 included, so at least enough for each of your crew to get 1. Do what I did, and look for a person/couple with at least half their tickets left with an hour to go and make friends.
