I hate to pile on, but if there's one thing the beer geeks are talking about this week, it's the Lost Abbey bottle release debacle. Bottle debacle. Debottle? The San Marcos, Calif., operation really tried to release its 2016 version of Duck Duck Gooze last week. It’s only the third time the beer has been released since 2009, as it is a blend of 1-, 2-, and 3-year old beers.
First, Lost Abbey tried to manage the sale online with a vendor called Nexternal. This ticket-seller’s website crashed the last time Duck Duck Gooze was released, and it did so again this year, catastrophically. Lost Abbey had to delay the release from July 26 until July 29. Brown Paper Tickets was up next, but according to Lost Abbey’s Twitter feed, that site wouldn’t load on the seller side of the transaction on the day of the sale. Lastly, Eventbrite was tapped, and the link went live two hours past the scheduled start. That was at about 3 p.m. Wisconsin time on Friday.
I’m trying to paint for you a picture of the somewhat frantic nature of the Duck Duck Gooze release, because what I want to talk about has to do with the general beer geek freakout over this beer, and some others like it.
Lost Abbey doesn’t allow proxies in its beer releases.
Okay, the proxy system. It’s not as arcane as it sounds, but I grant that it can sound a little arcane. Basically, a proxy (also occasionally called a trustee) is sort of like the person at the auction who has a phone to his ear, and raises his paddle every time the buyer on the other end of the line wants to bid.
With beer, it goes like this. A brewery has a beer to sell, and it’s going to sell it straight from the brewery as opposed to via distribution to liquor stores. The brewery has a couple options. It can say no to proxies, which means each person has to adhere to whatever per-person bottle limit has been established, and can’t pick up bottles for anyone else even if they have that person’s express permission.
Or, it can say yes to proxies. In that case, Person A (who doesn’t live close enough to the brewery to attend a release event) can authorize Person B to pick up the bottles in his or her stead. This really only works when the bottles are purchased electronically in advance, or are part of a pre-paid brewery membership society.
So, Lost Abbey says no to proxies. That means people need to know whether or not they’ve gotten through to the website to actually purchase the bottles because then they have to arrange for travel to San Marcos. Plus that particular beer is $41 per 750mL bottle, and it’s pretty rare, and beer geeks generally succumb to beer panic rather easily. When the system goes down, under these conditions, you can see why the Lost Abbey Twitter mentions, well, they weren’t pretty that day.
Madison’s Funk Factory allows proxies, but significantly cut its per-person bottle limits for the most recent release to smooth out the per-buyer distribution curve. Central Waters, meanwhile, does not allow them — though this is more a logistical issue. Central Waters’ anniversary stouts are allocated to buyers of general admission tickets, and those attendees pay cash for the actual beers. The tickets help the brewery gauge upcoming attendance. Proxy buyers would throw a wrench in those works.
Outside of Wisconsin, it seems to me that more breweries with reserve societies allow for proxies or trustees than don’t. The Rare Barrel (Berkeley, Calif.), The Bruery (Placentia, Calif.), and De Garde (Tillamook, Ore.) all allow trustees to retrieve reserve society bottles for geographically distant members. Hill Farmstead (Greensboro Bend, Vt.) had an extremely limited membership called Collected Works that allowed proxies, but after that membership went by the wayside, subsequent lottery releases were no-proxy zones.
Upland (Bloomington, Ind.) allows proxies to pick up bottles of its sour beers allocated for purchase via lottery. Three Floyds (Munster, Ind.) is quite rigorous in limiting sales of its Dark Lord imperial stout to only the person whose name is on the very nontransferable ticket, plus the one additional ticket each person can buy. These two people have to buy their bottles together. It’s really very serious.
Unfortunately, part of what makes these kinds of limited releases such a brow-furrowing endeavor is that there are a lot of jerks out there, who misuse the ability to designate proxies in order to hoard beer. Local hoarder asks friends far and wide to buy bottles they have no intention of retrieving or even keeping, designate that local hoarder as the proxy, and then the local hoarder pays the remote buyers back and rakes in way more than the per-person limit would allow.
Personally, I’m not a fan of designing a system to stymie the rude or selfish. (That’s why I’ll always advocate for traffic circles no matter how many people cut me off in them.) I would rather the brewery was transparent, flexible, and encouraged fairness from its fans than shut off proxies and remain a rigidly locals-only operation. I myself was a proxy for a few friends and associates at the last Funk Factory release, but every one of those bottles purchased from afar will go to the people who bought them. I’m not looking to profit, I just like to help when I can.
That’s the kind of beer community I want to see nurtured. Allowing proxies makes everyone a little less high-strung about these high-stakes releases, and makes buyers a little more forgiving of hiccups. I know Lost Abbey — which eventually failed with Eventbrite on Friday and had to refund all completed transactions before going fully back to the drawing board over the weekend — could use a little latitude.
