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January 13, 2005

Big Beer Club Order

Filed under: Uncategorized — Aaron @ 10:33 am

It has been confirmed, we are going to be doing a large beer club order, that will ship on February 21st. A beer club is one of several companies that send you a six pack of beer every month. We do them every year, but we usually get the ‘undesirable’ summer months, when we barely have room or time to do them. This is the first time we have ever gotten an order during the slow winter season.. so Hooray!

This order is exceptionally large too. I guess the beer clubs sell more beer just after the holidays, because of the number of people who get subscriptions as gifts. They want maximum of 130 bbl’s of our Colony Oatmeal Stout, and 100 bbls of our Warsh Pail Ale. That would be 1800 and 1400 cases, respectively. WOW!

Of course, they pick the two most difficult and expensive beers to brew! The Stout is difficult run-off for us, and we haven’t quite figured out the best way to dry hop the pale ale. I’m going to be experimenting with bagging our dry hops so that they don’t end up clogging up our bottle filler later on.

The side benefit of this is that we don’t know exactly how much beer they will take until the last minute.. so we have to make extra of each beer. That means that you HOP HEADS will be seeing our Warsh Pale ale early this spring, since we will be bottling and selling all the ‘extra’ beer! This should work out fine, as it looks like the Schokolade Bock will be gone by then. We have only one batch left, and we will be bottling it this week.

We don’t make much per case, but the volume of the order will help us get a smart start on the new year!

7 Responses to “Big Beer Club Order”

  1. kmeeks Says:

    Mmmmm, HopHeads. You must be thinking of me and my ilk. We’ll gladly accept the extra/early Warsh Pale Ale.

  2. Jeff Schaefer Says:

    congratulations. how do you ship it?

  3. chrishickman Says:

    Everybody chant with me:

    “Year-round Pail Ale and Pilsner! Year-round Pail Ale and Pilsner!”

    I’m digging the Schokolade Bock too, so I am sad to hear that it’ll be gone soon. Can’t wait to see the fabled Millstream Dopplebock, whenever that happens. What do you think of the Sprecher Winter Brew? That’s one of my favorite seasonals by any brewery, I think (though the two aforementioned Millstream ones + Maifest and Oktoberfest are all top 10).

    Anywho, the real reason I’m posting is that I thought the geek side of you might be interested in at least reading this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/1642234&tid=222

  4. eware Says:

    Chrishickman. That is awsome. Way cool.

  5. Aaron Says:

    Well I though you hopheads would be happy at the news! We were sort of thinking of doing something like this anyway, but the beer club really forces the issue. For us, the tricky thing is that we need to get a new 6 pack carrier made for the Warsh Pail, so that we don’t have two seasonal carriers when the Maifest comes out. That gets the retail stores really confused since they have the same UPC code.

    I’ll be writing about the dopplebock soon. You’ll be seeing it…

    I haven’t had the sprecher brew yet. This weekend we tried a bunch of American Micro “winter beers” and “Porters and Stouts”and I can’t say I cared much for any of the winter beers. My favorite is the Boulevard Nutcracker Ale, and of course that was already gone (though I guess that is technically a ‘christmas ale’). The best was Boulevard’s Dry Stout and Bert Grants Perfect Porter.

    Chris that is totally geek. Here is a hardlink for that computerized homebrew system. I do read slashdot, and I am a geek.. but still..

  6. Aaron Says:

    Oh, and we ship it by Semi-truck. The beer club will require two semi’s. You can only fit 24 pallets of beer (60 cases to a pallet) on a semi due to weight restrictions. I just hope we don’t get that semi driver like we did that one time, he refused to drive the beer anywhere because it was against his religion. 0_o So we had to wait for them to find another driver.

  7. chrishickman Says:

    He must be Mormon then, certainly isn’t Catholic!

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