Kyle Nabilcy
Late autumn of 2011 in Madison is an epoch ago, at least as far as beer goes. Isthmus Beer Cheese Fest and Madison Craft Beer Week were in their infancies. This column wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye, as I traversed the metro area reviewing ill-fated sausage shops and suburban pizza joints. Karben4 didn’t exist; neither did One Barrel or Next Door. Ale Asylum hadn’t brewed a big imperial stout yet, to say nothing of holding a big bottle release party for it.
One thing that did pop up in Madison, and caused the same sort of waves it caused nationwide, was the 2011 bottling and release of Founders CBS, or Canadian Breakfast Stout. It’s currently the twelfth-highest rated beer on Beer Advocate, and is a constant presence in any discussion of beer whales, trade bait, and cellar brags. And in 2011, I missed it.
It was the first one that got away, the first beer I didn’t know I wanted until it was way too late to find any. Gone were the days of 12-ounce bottles of Goose Island Bourbon County Stout lingering for weeks on the shelf at Woodman’s. CBS came and went like a flash, and there I was, grasping at the smoke. I remember very clearly, pacing outside the Half Price Books on East Towne Boulevard while my wife shopped inside. I was calling bottle shops to see if they still had any and coming up short like a big fat loser.
Eventually, in 2015, Founders brewed CBS again. It was a draft-only release, and despite the clamor and perception of rarity, it wasn’t all that hard to find. There were three different tap events in the south central Wisconsin area. One was at Showboat Saloon in the Dells, and it was there that my palate was at long last introduced to the chocolate, coffee, and maple of CBS. To top it off, the owner cracked open a bottle of 2011 CBS, and the wound was finally healed. The whale had been conquered.
So when Founders announced that CBS would return to bottles on December 1, 2017, I knew what I had to do. I took the whole dang day off of work.
Now, truck chasing is one of the more lame habits of the beer geek world. It can literally refer to over-eager consumers following delivery trucks from store to store, or just scouring the city looking for any shop that might still have stock available. Bottle shops don’t like it; I imagine the truck drivers don’t much care for it; and people who don’t have the flexibility to take a day off of work just to buy beer really hate it.
It’s kind of a bad look, but there was no way I was going to come out of another CBS release empty-handed. So yeah, I kind of truck-chased.
First, though, I waited in a line that was publicized well in advance. Whole Foods announced it would sell its CBS allocation, as well as its Goose Island Bourbon County allocation and a very small amount of (deep breath) Evil Twin/Westbrook Maple Bourbon Barrel-Aged Imperial Mexican Biscotti Cake Break, right away at 8 a.m. on Friday.
It was almost anticlimactic, but everyone who waited in line got almost everything they came for. The store’s allotment of Evil Twin was just three bottles, and they were long gone by the time I got to the front of the line. All of a sudden, I had a bottle of CBS in my hand at last, and it was immediately replaced by the Evil Twin beer in the “what do I have to do to get this bottle” area of my brain. Beer is a cruel, cruel passion.
At another shop, I grabbed a bottle for a friend who doesn’t get Founders distribution where he lives. I put the word out to some friends who were interested, and then set about trying to find a bottle of the MBBAIMBCB. Hey, not every beer has a tidy initialism.
The things I learned about this beer: Most shops that received it got only three bottles. The price, I was told, was jacked up pretty high from when shops first requested it through distribution. The cost to the consumer was roughly $40 for a 22-ounce bottle. Yeesh.
But I was feeling the urge. The compulsion. I left my name with the shop closest to my house, just in case another bottle turned up. I sicced out-of-state friends and acquaintances on it. It was not a “prepared to scour the earth” situation, but it was moving in that direction. And then, thanks to an idle beer shopping question from my wife, I wandered into Steve’s on University and unexpectedly found a bottle.
Sometimes it’s that hard and that easy. Look at Sunday’s ticket release for Central Waters’ 20th Anniversary party and bottle sale. If you tried to get to Brown Paper Tickets on a mobile device, chances are good you never even saw the page load successfully, starting about 15 minutes before go-live. If you were on the full site on a laptop, though, it was basically just a matter of refreshing right at 6 p.m., adding the tickets to your cart, and clicking the buy button. An awful lot of woe on Facebook for a transaction that so many others had no problems with.
There’s more beer than any one person could ever drink, and only so much money in the bank and room in the fridge. But sometimes you have to do things you don’t quite enjoy doing, like being one of THOSE PEOPLE who bounce from shop to shop, to make sure you get the beer that means the most to you. Until the next one comes along.
