The brewery brews a beer, packages it, and either goes through a distributor or self-distributes—selling it out of the taproom and/or dropping off kegs and bottles itself. The customer visits the brewery, bar, or bottle shop and purchases that beer for consumption. It’s a short, happy story.
Yet it’s not always that simple, short, or happy, particularly when dealing in the realm of rare beers—whether it’s a small batch barrel-aged imperial stout or annual releases of a double IPA. In craft beer consumers’ pursuit for rare beers, in bar and bottle shop owners’ desire to sell them, and in the methods breweries use to distribute them, the story becomes less about the beer itself and more a scramble to acquire bottles, with finger pointing when it doesn’t work out.
This past Saturday, March 8, Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Florida, held its Fifth Annual Hunahpu’s Day to celebrate the release of Hunahpu, an 11% ABV imperial stout aged on cacao nibs, Madagascar vanilla beans, ancho chilis, pasilla chilis, and cinnamon. After the mayhem of 2013, when about 9,000 people packed the Cigar City parking lot, the brewery sold tickets and planned to cap the event at 3,500 attendees. Anyone with a ticket would be able to purchase up to three 22-ounce bottles of Hunahpu and enjoy samples of other beers. What happened instead was “a nightmare,” as Cigar City called it. Because of counterfeit tickets, more than 6,000 people showed up, and many attendees went home angry and without any bottles.