Phew! That was quite an experience.
This weekend was the first release of one of our barrel-aged, fruit refermented sour beers (Atrial Rubicite) in a large format bottles (1.5L magnums). As a collection of homebrewers turned pro, we’re very, very grateful for the interest, enthusiasm, and enjoyment of our beer. It really means a lot. Jester King was opened in 2010 with a fundamental sense of insecurity that practically no one would enjoy, or frankly purchase, our beer. The fact that the desire for our beer has translated into a viable business is something that’s far from lost on us. To that end, we really appreciate everyone who waited for long hours this weekend for Atrial Rubicite magnums. We understand the situation wasn’t perfect — far from it. We take full responsibility for that, and pledge a better, drama free setup going forward.
As a lot of our supporters will recall, we went through a learning curve on how to effectively manage the release of our 500ml barrel-aged, fruited sour beers. Who can forget the “Funk n’ Line Fest” of 2014? In our opinion, we’d say the release of these beers is now handled pretty well. We like mangum bottles, and we plan to continue to release them. However, managing the release is something we’ll improve upon.
We feel as though this release was a learning experience for us. In hindsight, we should have expected that only fifty bottles per day would create chaos and make emotions run high. Partially in our defense, we were lulled into a false sense of security by the (in our opinion) smoothness of the last several fruited sour releases. For those who feel they got a raw deal, please e-mail me directly (jstuffings@jesterkingbrewery.com), and we’ll try to make it right. We put out a request for people to please not show up before dawn, but we knew we had no way of actually enforcing that policy. So our apologies for the drama, confusion, and frustration/anger that ensued.
We’ll do better going forward. We’ll continue to be a drama free environment going forward (something we pride ourselves on). And we’ll continue to be eternally grateful for the interest in and support of our beer.
Cheers,
Jeff
UPDATE 27 July 2017 from Jester King:
We appreciate everyone who reached out to us to share their experiences with last weekend’s release of Atrial Rubicite in magnum bottles. We appreciate the feedback, and it was uplifting to read so many nice things written about our beer, brewery, and staff.
We know in hindsight we setup a system destined to fail, where people who followed our requests ultimately got punished for it. First come, first serve was no way to handle such a limited release. We’re sorry for the resulting drama that ensued, and we feel bad it cast a negative shadow on some of our customers’ experiences at Jester King last weekend.
We had a chance this week to sit down as a staff and discuss how to go about similar releases in the future. Going forward, we’ll be moving to a lottery system for similar releases, and lottery winners will have multiple weekends to show up and purchase their beer. Also, people we see re-selling our beer online won’t be eligible for future lotteries.
Before next time, we’ll post details on how the lottery will work, etc. But until then, please know that we don’t want our customers to have to go to crazy lengths to get our beer, and we especially don’t want them to have to deal with drama and ugliness. Lines from time to time (especially ones under an hour) are something we’re willing to tolerate, and we appreciate our customers dealing with them. But having to resort to anything more than that is not something we want our customers to have to experience.
We believe Jester King is a special place, and we’re very protective about having our customers feel like they had a really wonderful, unique experience visiting us. While things undoubtedly won’t be perfect moving forward, we will treat this as a learning experience and make sure things go much more smoothly next time around.Thanks and we appreciate all the kind words and support!
Cheers,
Jeff
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