It was just shy of a year ago that I was writing about the hype over certain big adjunct stout releases, and the semi-rabid beer drinkers who chased after them, yours truly included. A year later — well, life comes at you fast, as the internet often says.
The last couple of weeks saw the 2018 return of Founders CBS, its maple-inflected variation on KBS, as well as the release of a brand-new Quadruple Barrel Big Bad Baptist from Epic Brewing. Both are the type of beer that would send nerds out into the wild at just about any hour of the day in years past, yet this year, I saw more lingering quantity than I would have ever expected.
One retailer told me that his shop was offered a stack of Quadrupel Baptist cases as tall as I am (so, hardly a rare bottle, even if I’m not the tallest guy) as a sort of “better luck next time” gesture for not getting a great allocation of a different bourbon barrel stout. Another retailer reached out to me on Twitter to put the word out about its remaining stash of CBS and Surly’s annual Russian imperial stout, Darkness. This was almost a week after CBS first hit local shelves, and almost two weeks after Darkness landed.
What gives? It’s not like big ridiculous stouts aren’t still a thing. Goose Island, as I’ve discussed here, is releasing four adjunct versions of Bourbon County Brand Stout next week as part of its biggest-ever eight-beer 2018 BCS lineup. But maybe, as a retailer speculated to me, it might be a case of veteran craft beer drinkers getting wise to which hyped-up stouts are deserving and which are just hyped up.
It’s also not as though people aren’t willing to pony up for a beer with actual or perceived rarity. Just this last Tuesday, an unannounced number of allocations for Toppling Goliath’s Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout sold out in minutes. This is a beer that will be sold at the Decorah, Iowa, brewery only, is limited to one twelve-ounce bottle per person only, and at a cost of $100 per bottle. Let that sink in for a moment. And it sold out in a flash.
One thing BCS and KBBS have in common, other than snappy initials, is a smaller packaging format. Goose Island switched its BCS lineup to 16.9-oz. bottles in 2015, and KBBS only comes in the aforementioned 12oz bottle. If hype-chasers are finally starting to prefer bottles they could ostensibly open at home and drink among one or two people, as opposed to feeling like every 22-oz. or 750mL bottle has to be a special occasion shared among a dozen friends, then that might explain the perceived retail slowdown.
Another explanation? The haze craze. Trend hype has started to shift from thick adjunct stouts to the New England IPA, and with that, a new purchasing preference for 16-oz. cans over glass bottles of any size. When breweries like Hacienda and Brewing Projekt are dropping fresh hazebombs every other week, and those beers demand relatively prompt consumption, it gets hard out there for a barrel-aged stout.
I can personally speak to a certain amount of exhaustion in keeping up with new breweries, new releases, collaborations, online lotteries and ticketed events. When a friend offered to grab me a bottle of CBS he was already lined up to get, my first thought was, Whew, now I don’t have to worry about hustling to find it. Turns out I didn’t really need to worry. Multiple retailers told me volume was generally down for people calling in about these releases, and production volume appears to be up.
And now it’s almost Black Friday, with its attendant Goose Island Bourbon County madness. There’s no production volume like Goose Island production volume, and I’m sure I’ll be out there hustling all the same. Don’t have to learn from history if you’re planning on repeating it anyway.
