Can't Pay Won't Pay?

Boak and Bailey have poked me with a stick. In a friendly way. So I'm going to get something off my chest.

It's actually something I saw them comment on, maybe on twitter, about being priced out of craft beer. I never saw the context for the convo, but I'd been out for a few beers one Thursday afternoon and ended up (like I do) at Cask, and their comment resonated.

I know quite a lot of the interesting craft beer imports are coming in 'grey' e.g. via Scandinavia, and I assume these beers are picking up on-costs as they find their way from brewer to point of sale. But I'm wondering if the beers that are coming in are all at the ticker end of the scale, and attracting a Spooge Premium as a result.

The beer that's made me think this is from a small brewery in New England called Alchemist. They were a brewpub before Hurricane Irene devastated Vermont and left Alchemist with a brewery and no bar. However, they brew a huge IPA called Heady Topper, and this survived the storm.

Two weeks ago I was in the Jugged Hare, the Fullers pub on Vauxhall Bridge Road, trying some of their Wild River American hopped pale ale. The staff were a bit perplexed. What was this beer with the disconcerting aroma and bitterness they couldn't pin down? I just sipped happily.

All Rivered out for now, I popped over to Cask. The legendary fridges have been re-tooled with some rare bottles, including Drie Fonteinen's Armand De Belder's rare limited bottled series of lambics (at £55 a pop), and some lovely Alesmith bombers (if you haven't tried Speedway Stout, you've got a gap in your dark beer experience).

But these beers weren't what got me thinking. Like a lot of US brewers, Alchemist have been canning their beers. 16oz of IPA deliciousness. Canning technology today is challenging the Kevin sterotype in the same way as the New Keg, unfiltered and unpasteurised, is changing the idea of 'chemical fizz' and 'zombeer'. In the UK you'll find cans from Brooklyn, Maui and, soon I hear, Sixpoint from New York.

The staff at Cask told me they had some cases of Heady Topper. A beer my associates Stateside have tried and like. A chance to sample a beer I wouldn't expect to see in the UK.

But. Gawd help me, but I can't justify spending £13 for 16oz of beer. I can't. I've had my moments with beer, and even though as a carer I live on a fixed income nowadays, I can usually find beer tokens for the odd half of imported keg once or twice a month. But £13 for a tin of beer? No matter how I try to justify it, that £13 sits right between my eyes. I could forego three pints of UK cask beer and buy one. But it just seems... wrong. I'm not sure I'm priced out of craft beer - not with so many lovely UK beers doing the rounds in our better bars and pubs. But I don't think I could live with myself if I laid out £13 for a single tin of beer, no matter how good.

I did a bit of digging. That £13 can of beer can be got from the brewery for $3.75 (about £2.50) for a single can or $12 (under £8) for a 4-pack. The Dive Bar in Manhattan sells it for $9 (£5.80) a can. I know there'll be shipping and Gideon wants his share of the tax generated by an 8% beer. But I can't help thinking that the beer is here because Beer Advocate and HateBeer members rate it very highly, and the Scandinavian market has got it and are selling some on to the UK to defray costs. In a way, are UK drinkers being asked to pay that Spooge Premium on this type of beer? Or, like cutting edge consumer goods, does somebody have to pay the big bucks until the rest of the market catches up and the price drops? Will we see more mass market beers from the US and elsewhere, or are importers looking for the tickerific stuff which RB and BA like? I know Russian River are on some importers' radars, for instance. Today, at Craft, an empty Pliny The Elder bottle on top of a fridge elicited two punter requests for some.

I dunno. But I know I can wait until a trip back to NY to try Heady Topper. Unless I see you at Cask, and it's your round...

'Beer's Black Market'

The estimable Washington Post has shone its investigative light on the sordid secondary market for spooge beer. Read the whole thing here. Woodward and Bernstein would be proud.

Of course, readers of my own estimable (?) e-organ would have picked up on this dark and unseemly activity in posts past. The Post's article is interesting in including views from such tickerific brewers as Lost Abbey, The Bruery and Stone. Greg Koch offers an interesting view, which I tend to agree with, that it isn't necessarily drinkability that drives this market, it's rarity. Hence RRBC's Framboise For The Cure going at $400 a bottle, and not a penny of that profit finding its way to the charity intended to benefit from its sale. Yet, if RRBC had offered it at double its original $12 price, they'd have been slaughtered by the same tickers for hyping the price.

I've been monstered for criticising the beer fanboy websites which offer trading forums driving some of this secondary market. Many of their members believe that it would all stop if these brewers bucked their ideas up and geared up to meet all demand. It doesn't seem to occur to them that not all brewers are in it for reasons other than global market domination. They simply can't accept they might miss a beer, and move on. I've been there and, trust me, it's not a happy place.

It will be interesting to see how ebay responds to this. Will they stop sales of 'collectible containers' (wink wink)? Police the listings looking for newly-released beers? I imagine their present ambivalence is partly driven by the easy money they rake off from this spooge. I expect the traders will find other ways to knock their spooge out - I believe Craigslist is used for this market, including to recruit mules for people who can't get to launch events. I'll be watching the reaction to this with interest...

(By the way, anybody interested in a 2005 Dark Lord?)

A Confederacy Of Dunces

I'm looking at you, HateBeer and TwatAdvocate. Natalie Cilurzo of Russian River relates the latest sorry episode of spoogebeerian gaming the system...

Pliny The Younger on EBAY - Seriously?

I've seen comments in threads on your pages where members who couldn't get to the brewpub were offering fervent wishes that maybe some of the 2011 batch of Pliny The Younger might be smuggled out and passed along to those less fortunate. And lo! it came to pass that one arsehole managed to do just that, and he putteth it on eBay.

You can sense the exasperation in Natalie's blog post. She saw their breast cancer beer hoovered up by these locusts, some of whom are now reaping $400 prices on eBay - there's one up there now. The point, however, is that Russian River asked beer lovers to respect their efforts to get this year's PtY to a wider audience, yet they're catching out visitors trying to get the beer out of the pub by hook or by crook. eBay seem to have removed the offending beer, and I hope they've banned the prick who tried to sell it.

Really, if these beer fanboy sites are to actually "respect beer" (the rallying call of TwatAdvocate), they should be jumping on this kind of thing - lock down threads, ban members, send a message they won't tolerate idiots who ignore the pleas of the brewers and try and feed this disgusting secondary market for their own profit.

I don't believe that brewers, by and large, generate hype for these beers (notable exception: Three Floyds). It all comes from what I've seen described as the Pokémon effect ("gotta tick 'em all!") generated by these fanboy sites.

Clean up your act, before its too late. These people don't have any business being anywhere near beer.

Ho Ho Ho! Russian River Upsets Spoogebeerians For Xmas

Highly-regarded Californian brewer Russian River has upset members of the beer trading community by announcing their programme for sales of seasonal Double IPA Pliny The Elder in 2011.

If you were reading back in the Spring, you'd have seen that a 'growler' (64 US fl. oz. container) of the stuff made it here. RRBC launch the beer each year saying it should last "longer than a day, but less than a week". In 2010, it didn't even last a day, as queues round the block exhausted the batch in record tine. Much of it ended up being traded by the vile spoogebeerians who infest a dark corner of the beer-drinking community. RRBC was also targeted when it released a special beer for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and spoogebeerians bought up the lot.

For the 2011 Pliny The Younger release, RRBC has taken steps to ensure Pliny The Younger is available in the pub for 2 weeks, and that means they won't be filling any growlers. As Natalie Cilurzo says in the RRBC blog,

kegs will be allocated to last for exactly 2 weeks. Therefore, we may run out at the pub each day, but will have more the following day for 2 weeks. It will be available in 10 oz. glasses only- no growlers or bottles to go. This will allow more beer enthusiasts like you, as well as our regular customers, to enjoy some Younger this year! And we won't see it on Ebay!

Predictably, this has exercised some of the BeerAdvocate 'community', who've have taken their heads out of their backsides arguing over whether a hefeweizen is an ale (see Ron Pattinson's post, but be prepared to lose your will to live) for long enough to notice what RRBC are doing.

Never mind a brewer is plugged in to the local community and wants to ensure regulars and locals can drink their beer, this isn't good enough. Some BAs think that the brewery needs to consider massive expansion so they can sell into all 50 US states. One thought that RRBC needed the trading market driven by these selfish buggers to build business. Yeah, right. Like a hole in the head. A few voices of reason surfaced, but the sense of entitlement that comes off some of these people is nauseating.

So, a craft brewer strikes a blow against the Grinches of the spoogebeer trading collective. Hopefully they won't be the last.

Joy on earth, peace and goodwill to all men*, ho ho ho and buy the Frank Sidebottom box set! Merry Christmas!

*but not spoogebeerians.

Pssstt! Wanna Watch A Car Crash..?

Then have a look here for the next few days. A Thousand Beer Vouchers American! For a bottle of beer!

Story from the shadowy Beer Underground is that this beer was very nice on release some five years or so back. Locals knowing it was a one-off anniversary brew (Sarah Palin?), bought up a few cases, and have been slowly dripping it into the spooge beer pool as tradebait. The seller in this case has been on HateBeer to explain his motives. Seems he wants to sell some spooge in order to buy his dad some Remy Martin Louis XIII brandy, which is supposed to sell at anything from $1,600 to $3,000 a bottle.

Another one of my Underground contacts says the buyer might have to prepare themselves for disappointment. He says he had information that a bottle opened recently had aged "into shit territory", so buyer beware. Of course, if a spoogebeerian is buying it, it won't be for drinking. Dear me no. It'll be straight into his Beer Mausoleum, probably in a little refrigerated display case with some tasteful display lighting.

I don't think I've ever tried any Midnight Sun beers, but some very good stuff occasionally emerges from Alaska. Safeway and Beers Of Europe used to sell Alaskan beers, giving rise to weirdness where I could buy a case of their 2004 Smoked Porter here, and had to take bottles back to New York, since the beer wasn't available there.

Spooge Vampires Bitten On The Bum

A delicious tale of spoofery and angst reaches me from The World Of Spooge. The normally reliable Beernews.org site carried news of a beer launch from the well-regarded and ticker-targeted Captain Lawrence brewery of Pleasantville NY. Reading from a press release purportedly from founder Scott Vaccaro, the site informed readers of the launch of several highly-desirable beers.

The 'news' was posted on Beer Advocate, where the trading forum vibrated into action. A few members with functioning cerebella smelled a rat and wondered why they hadn't seen the info, since they are on the brewery email list. Their voices were drowned out as the Vampires worked out how to corner the market in the precious nectar. Some bleated about the scheduling, complaining they had other spooge to hunt. Then, later the same day, word came down that it was all a hoax. Vaccaro had seen the info late in the day and passed word that it wasn't true. Beernews.org published a correction and apology, and BA admins locked down the thread before anybody exploded with anticipation.

All well and good? Well, not quite. The Ladies Of Craft Beer pondered a while and concluded that Captain Lawrence are somehow culpable because they don't have anybody scanning the social media interwebs 24 hours a day. Instead of just accepting somebody perpetrated a clever hoax that got a lot of knickers bunched, there has to be an inquest.

You want an inquest? The often despicable behaviour of these people in their single-minded pursuit of eBay and trading fodder continues to be hothoused by the online beer communities providing them with trading fora. They have become predictable in their greed, and eventually, somebody was bound to dupe them. To claim that a brewer has some complicity because he isn't baby-sitting a bunch of avaricious numbskulls instead of trying to run his business is to offer excuses for shallow greed and disrespect for beer. The Vampires scored big last month when they cleaned Russian River out of commemorative beer in 24 hours, this month they've been made to look stupid. Get over it.

Here's to the next stunt!

The Curious Case Of The Beer That Never Was...

One of the things I like about many US brewers is their sense of place and their support for the communities they sell beer in. Not just by the act of brewing and selling beer, but by embedding themselves in the life of the community.

So it is that, each October, Russian River Brewing Co of Santa Rosa CA, supports Breast Cancer Awareness Month by raising money for a local womens' health centre in Santa Rosa. Parade floats, sales of special "All Hopped Up For The Cure" merchandise, raffles and sales of beer. Last year, they wrote a cheque for $12,000, and hope to beat that for 2010.

As it turns out, they already put $3,000 in the kitty, but nobody is jumping up and down too much. RRBC brewed a small batch of beer (supposedly based on their Beatification ale), oak-aged for 6 months with raspberries. "Framboise For The Cure" was released at their pub on Thursday, but before they could announce it officially, the Spooge Vampires got wind. The lovely and fragrant Natalie Cilurzo takes up the tale on RRBC's blog:

I will admit, I am a little bummed that someone posted it on Beer Advocate before lunch yesterday and all 23 cases were snatched up in less than 24 hours.

From Beer Advocate, I learned that people were frantically calling local contacts to help them obtain the beer. Seems like our friends the mules were also in evidence to help the greedy buggers get around the '2 bottles per person' limit RRBC set to ensure fair availability.

I'm happy that RRBC sold all that beer and put a nice wedge into the fundraising kitty. What annoys me is the behaviour of these sad gits every time a limited-edition beer is released, even when it's for a worthy cause. HateBeer and BA trading forums are now glowing with traffic generated by this, with some traders self-righteously patting themselves on the back for supporting such a good cause. No doubt some of this beer will wind up on eBay selling for multiples of the $12 retail price, and bottles will be traded back and forth. After all, with only 276 bottles brewed, it's uber-rare. I don't suppose any of the profiteers will think of making a donation to the cause.

I'll leave the final word to Natalie:

And to those who did get a couple bottles, please drink it humbly with friends and family in honor and memory of the survivors and especially the ones who lost the good fight.

Fat chance.

Pic above by Mario Rubio

News From Spoogeland

If you aren't a regular reader, then this counts as Cliffs Notes: There are tickers, as celebrated in Phil Parkins' film, and whom I enjoy a lot. Then there are Spoogebeerians. These are the fanboys of the beer-ticking world, the uber-tickers. They outgrew comix and now they're going after beer. They want more than a tick, they want the brewer too. They'll go to extraordinary lengths to obtain rare beer ('Spooge') and have created the hothoused eBay secondary market for such beers. They can usually be found in their online hives at BeerAdvocate or Ratebeer.com. You can find a UK hive dedicated to BrewDog at their website blog.

ITEM! Tasting beer without drinking it? Are you serious? Seems a member at ratebeer was, forcing admins to lock down a thread after things got heated. It's bad enough that you can 'rate' a beer off a 1oz. sample, and I'm on the record with my opposition to reducing beer to a set of numbers, but to suggest you can fully experience beer by sipping, swilling and spitting out is just wrong. String this guy up by his tongue until he's sorry!

ITEM! Speaking of the Land Of The Locked-Down Thread (AKA BeerAdvocate), word reaches me that two members have developed the beer trading equivalent of the Duckworth-Lewis method to rank beers offered for trade. Seems some people are less than happy that they are getting less than they offered. so as a public service a matrix (uh oh!) has been created that will calculate the relative merits of beers for trade.

I can remember when these sites were communities of discussion and debate, about sharing a love of beer, about meeting new people and sharing opinions and info about favourite beer. Now they're marketplaces where the dickwavers come to offer their muled Kate The Greats or Dark Lords, while the level of discourse rarely moves above "what's in your fridge?" Sad.

ITEM! If you bought a BrewDog equityforpunks share (see previous posts) then you will be an interest holder in fabled Anchor Brewing in San Francisco! Keith Greggor, CEO of Griffin Group, who recently bought out Fritz Maytag, took time out from the busy handover programme to confirm the relationships between the LLCs means EFP investors will have a tiny part of the new Anchor Brewing & Distilling operation. It will be for BrewDog UK to decide what happens with dividends, and if I remember rightly, no dividend can be paid on an EFP share before 2012 at the earliest, but watch for more info. BrewDog should also let you know about tax liabilities.

ITEM! In local news, you might remember the acclaimed Cask Pub & Kitchen in Pimlico were having problems with hopeless rating site Beer In The Evening (or BITE). I hear there was an amusing postscript to the story. When Cask tried to join the site and paid their membership fee, meaning to use this route to get to the bottom of their supposed misdeeds, after a day or so they were contacted and informed their money was being refunded, that they not welcome, and that any further attempts to inquire would result in legal action. Cask then apparently offered to buy the BITE site.

These ratings sites are pathetic. They provide a forum for dimwits who think they are Egon Ronay who can hurt legitimate businesses with their narrow opinions and petty vendettas. And, lest it need repeating, my favourite pub ain't your favourite pub. We all like different things. Bear that in mind if you have to refer to one of these sites, and remember also that BITE only cares about hits. They're owned by a company that operates dating sites, so they know (and care) bugger-all about pubs.

Spooge Breaks Out At CBC 2010

Each year, brewing's great and good (and Don Burgess) convene in a large US city and celebrate craft beer. Each city will extend a welcome to the gathering, with special events in beer bars and brewpubs. There is a jamboree feel. I remember being in Philadelphia in 2005 and catching the back end of the event, a disco at the old Independence brewpub. Pints $1.

This year, the fun took place in Chicago. As well as all the networking and imbibing, CBC features a comprehensive series of seminars covering all aspects of brewing business. This year for instance, Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River gave a talk on successful barrel-aged sour beer programmes, market research mob Neilsen presented on brand loyalty in a proliferating market, and there were discussions on connecting with the craft beer drinker and key trends.

The one that caught my eye was entitled "Keeping Demand in Front of Supply: How to Build Grassroots Excitement for Limited Release Beers". Chaired by the Godfather of Extreme Beer, Dogfish Head's Sam Calagione led a panel including the aforementioned Vinnie Cilurzo, Patrick Rue from the Bruery and Scott Vaccaro from Captain Lawrence, through a discussion which encompassed:

* Percentage of sales going to non-core beers.
* Percentage of these beers sold through distributors vs. directly from their breweries.
* Processes leading to the release of specialty beers.
* Motivation and education of distributors to care about these beers as the world of retail/wholesaler consolidation and SKU proliferation becomes more challenging.
* POS/marketing/events/strategy that best allows them to captivate and intensify the excitement for these beers.
* What role do packaging and container size play in these releases?

The composition of the panel was interesting, as it included three brewers who are making beers which are targets for the spoogebeerian community. I don't believe the Brewers Association break down figures in the craft sector by "core" and "non-core" (i.e. one-offs) production, but I'd love to see the split for smaller brewers such as Three Floyds (their 2010 Dark Lord Day occurs this Saturday coming), Captain Lawrence and brewpubs such as Portsmouth, whose 2010 Kate The Great launch caused so much ill-feeling.

What didn't appear to be up for discussion (although you'd need to be a fly on the wall to know for sure) is as interesting. Clearly, not all brewers' beers generate the same excitement. Captain Lawrence released something called Barrel Select Batch #1 last Saturday, and while the brewery was busy, it wasn't the mayhem that accompanied the release of Rosso e Marrone, which is a GABF Gold Medal Winner, acclaimed world's best beer blah blah blah.

Then there's the matter of the secondary market around the most sought-after beers. Go to ebay's US site, and browse under the breweriana>glass bottles section in collectibles. Beers from Three Floyds, Russian River, Bells, even Westvleteren, all on offer at prices in multiples of retail.

In the wake of the Kate The Great launch, I wrote to a number of US brewers to ask how they felt about this market. No-one replied, but I do wonder how somebody like Scott Vaccaro feels to see his company accused of price-gouging by raising the price of Rosso e Marrone this year, knowing that beer tickers and hoarders are gaming the system by using mules to buy multiple bottles for selling on at multiples of his retail price.

Finally, who makes this market? I suppose Dark Lord Day provides a sort of template for a brewery-based event. It targets a local community, even if that community mean to make big bucks via ebay. But, can a brewer manage this non-core market? Tickers are notoriously fickle. They tend to flutter from one brewery to the Next Big Thing. The Bruery has been on the end of it. And Firestone-Walker. And Lost Abbey. Is the movement of this annoying but financially-significant niche predictable or manageable? Is the 'grassroots' Sam Calagione refers to, a different consumer demographic than the tickers and hoarders? Or, are the brewers sensing a South Sea Bubble they'd like to manage before it bursts?

Moby Dickheads

I very much enjoyed the little heated debate between The Beer Nut and The Boy Dredge which was provoked by spooge beer. BN set forth the proposition that hard-to-find beers and brewery launches, as seen in the US mostly, were Bad For Beer. Mark, all enthusiasm and curiosity, set out a counter-argument that we could do with more of what he called Blockbuster Beers. There were some great contributions, including from Cookie. For the record, I tend to agree with Beer Nut, although I'm not sure the breweries are loving it all as much as they might.

Now, I've got some very good sources who provided me with information about some of the most recent US launches. I was going to regale you with anecdotes about the idiots who pitched up at Southampton Publick House at around midnight on one of the coldest nights of the year to queue for a couple of beers. Or the spoogebeerians who protested about the price of the Captain Lawrence 2010 Rosso e Marrone, then were seen with many more bottles than the per-person limit. All, no doubt going on eBay, or for trades.

Then, more seriously, there was the fall-out from the Kate The Great Imperial Stout launch at Portsmouth Brewing in New Hampshire, when local Beer Advocates who picked up on rumours of place-holding in the queue, stampeded and panicked the brewpub into changing their opening arrangements at very short notice and with no warning, meaning people who drove from as far away as Boston arrived to find the bottles all sold. Meantime, bottles were being pre-sold on eBay. I hear Portsmouth are thinking about a better way to handle this for next year. I'd suggest one way is to ignore greedy tickers who only want the beer to hoard or sell on.

I was going to set out some of the traders' lexicon - talk about the so-called 'White Whales', the rare beers which make tickers tremble with desire. The circle-jerkery of BIF. The hot-housing of a craft-beer niche by online groups. As Beer Nut proposed, all bad for beer.

Then, I found this.

You don't have to watch it all - you'll get the idea. I think it ought to have had a soundtrack. "Raising The Count" by Cabaret Voltaire, or some dramatic Hammer Horror music would have done. Otherwise, I leave you with one thought. If this guy loves beer, he loves it the same way Josef Fritzl loved his kids. And that isn't good.

The Lexicon Of Beer 1: Spooge Beer

This is sort of a response to a recent thread on 'extreme' beer offered up by The Boy Dredge. It sort of petered out, but it got me thinking about the lexicon of beer. This was emphasised while watching the 'Beerticker' film made by Phil Parkin, with its talk of 'scooping' and 'cellar runs'.

So: SPOOGE. I offer a definition from the Urban Dictionary which most accurately sums up what I think it means, although this definition is easily interchangeable with the more earthy definition making up the rest of the entry.

spooge

1. n. Male ejaculate; [cum]
2. v. To ejaculate; [cum]
3. v. To become intensely excited about something.

Of course, my definition is number 3 on the above list.

So, what is it? Simply, it's rare or otherwise hard-to-find beer, thoughts of procurement of which send the eager drinker into paroxysms of beer rapture. I offer this anecdote as illumination.

A London-based beer enthusiast might have been in New York City this summer, and may have had cause to visit one of the well-beloved beer establishments in Brooklyn. Upon entering this establishment, he will have met your correspondent. Once pleasantries had been exchanged (I recall my words were along the lines of "what the fuck are YOU doing here!?"), the eager tourist might have made enquiries about the availability of a very hard-to-find beer that was produced and bottled for the bar in 2005. Turning up empty-handed, the party may have departed for another fine beer establishment in the neighbourhood.

Move ahead to late Autumn, and your correspondent is to meet friends from the SE United States. They are bringing some spooge beer of their own, and I mean to reciprocate with something nice from my stash. I discuss this with the management of The Rake, since one of the many reasons why I love the place is a willingness to permit bottles to be brought in. A taste of the beer in question is the usual fee.

The assistant manager of the establishment might be a so-called 'Ratebeerian', and in the course of discussing which beers I'd contribute, I impart the information that I might have a bottle of the beer which was the object of the fruitless search in New York, which might go down well. A grown man suddenly takes on the demeanour of a wee boy woken by Santa on Xmas morn. His eyes widen in wonder at the possibility of tasting this rare nectar, and he enthusiastically presses your writer to bring this beer, telling me he means to contact the erstwhile tourist and tell him of his luck. The circle closes. End anecdote.

Spooge beer has become a tiny but disproportionately important niche of the US craft beer market. Some breweries have special launch days, notably Three Floyds, who have an annual 'Dark Lord Day' when the Munster, IN brewery is besieged by a mob resembling the shoppers queueing for the first day of Selfridges' sale. All of these people are craft beer fans determined to buy up some of the breweries' Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout, which is sold just on that day. Each vintage is in a crown and corked bottle sealed with wax - a different colour wax for each vintage. Much of this beer will not be drunk by the buyer, but will be traded. It has been common in the past couple of years for beer fans who can't get to the event, to pay for others to act as 'mules' in the same way as innocent tourists sometimes wind up transporting drugs through ports.

Is this good for beer? Should breweries be feeding this hype? Does the beer stand up to the hype? That's another post or two.

So, I give you: SPOOGE.

In case you were wondering about the stars of my anecdote, step forward Duff Wallace as The Tourist, Tom Cadden as The Assistant Manager and bottle no. 139 (out of 168) of Cantillon Spuyten Duyvil, a superb blended lambic with cranberries. If you've ever tried Sam Adams Cranberry Lambic, that's wretched cold fruit tea compared to this sublime beer.