First off, I want to thank you for your feedback, Natalie and I are extremely appreciative of all of our customers and the last thing we want are un-happy patrons at our pub and un-happy RRBC beer drinkers out in the market place. Natalie and I take the criticism very personal! We want your feedback as it will help us with next year.
I want to sincerely and personally apologize for those that were and are un-happy with us for running out of beer and for the long line. We also want to thank again all those that came out in masses for Pliny the Younger!
We had no idea that 10 times more people would show up to the pub this year as compared to last year. We sent out the same two emails as we did the previous four years, one after we brewed the Younger and another just before the release. Since we started making Pliny the Younger 6 years ago, social media as changed our world drastically and it is much easier for one person to tell another person about a beer or an event. It is probably a good thing that we don’t twitter, my space, face book, etc… or it could have been even busier when we opened the doors at 11am.
In hindsight, we should have made it a two growler minimum instead of a 4 growler minimum. We had the same limit last year and we still had growlers left after the first day, and last year we had less new growlers than we did this year. When we opened the doors and I saw that most people were ordering their maximum growler limit of four, I immediately pulled the Dead Leaf Green off tap and made that a Pliny the Younger tap. We already had a double faucet of Younger running at the opposite side of the bar; this is where my amazing wife was the entire day, all the while on her bad knee that she has had two surgeries on over the last 6 months! Once I had three taps running at the bar, I set up a fourth tap back in the brewery for growler fills only. Luckily we already have beer faucet and shank set up off the cold box wall in the brewery so all it took was a new piece of 10 foot tubing to run from the tank to the faucet. We were running from a serving tank so there was no keg switch over’s. I want to take second to thank Brandon one of our delivery guys and his sister and brother in law who came back and helped build growlers for a good part of the day. I also want to thank Kyle and Eric from Kern River Brewing who helped me fill growlers in the brewery, also for a good part of the day. This is the true mark of the craft beer industry!
There was as I mentioned above a 4 growler limit, our staff did the best they could to keep people from buying more. I’m sure some did, but, our staff did their best. Keep in mind that our 4th Street location is a brewpub and not a production brewery so there were dozens of orders going through our POS system at a time and not just one line like other breweries and wineries release days. For those of you in line, who saw people running more than 4 growlers out to their car, please keep in mind that they had several other people at their table who also took their limit. A table of 6 were buying 24 growlers and one person was running them back to their car while the others hung out and ate and drank. Please again keep in mind that we are a restaurant and pub so many people were hanging out for the day enjoying our pub. We staffed as much as we could, we know how to staff for a very busy day. Take away the growler fills and the number of people in the pub is what we deal with each and every year for the Tour of California cycling race. Our kitchen can only make so many pizza’s, our servers can only move so much food and beer, and you can only put so many bartenders behind the bar without them tripping over each other. Some have suggested we limit the amount of time a group could keep a table, I see your point, but, we try not to change our policy for just one day a year, this is not our style. If this was the case we would have not had our customary Sunday Happy Hour (which we have had from the first day we opened our pub 6 years ago) last year when the Tour of California happened to fall on a Sunday. The only policy we changed was the growler limit, come in any other day of year and we’ll fill as many growlers of any other beer other than Younger as you want. Also keep in mind that in California it is against the law to fill another breweries growler as there are label laws that apply to growlers just as they do to regular crowned or corked bottled beers.
We are in a recession right now and Natalie and I honestly did not think that everyone would buy their limit; it just didn’t seem feasible in our mind. We run our brewery very humbly; we do not take anything for granted. We did know that a lot of people would show up, more than last year, but, we had no idea that there would be a 2 hour line all day and that everyone would buy their limit. We thought that people might actually buy less because of the economy. We are very thankful for everyone’s business and support!
I’ve also been emailed about distribution outside of our brewpub and the lack of information. In California it is against state law for us to single out accounts and list them specifically, to use a term from the state Alcohol Beverage Control it is called “giving things of value”. We basically cannot single out an account or two and say XYZ will have it, in the eyes of the ABC this is an unfair practice. I will say that most places that get Elder will get Younger, again, most, but not all. We start to ship to distributors this week and to accounts in the local market which we self-distribute to.
We brew at 100% capacity year round, so there isn’t much room for us to make any changes to our production schedule. We are able to brew at full capacity year round because of our great customers both in Santa Rosa at our pub and out of the area and we are very appreciative of all of you! This year I started planning for Pliny the Younger in very early on. For example, I brewed Rejection and Benediction, two Belgian style beers that are ok with some age on them in October, both of which get released around the same time as Pliny the Younger. Unfortunately, we can’t brew our hoppy beers ahead of time as the age does not do them justice and we sell more of them. Each year we have to decide what is the “sacrificial lamb”, that is, what beer are we not going to brew to make Pliny the Younger. Last year I brewed less Pliny the Elder and that was a bad decision, it was a mistake on my part. We were feeling the effects of my bad decision all the way into May last year. This year I kept the Elder production the same so our distribution was not interrupted. We pulled back on production of Blind Pig IPA and Russian River IPA, both of which when brewed at our brewpub are made in the largest tanks we have there. It takes 21 to 24 days to make most of our beers (except the barrel beers). Pliny the Younger takes 6 weeks and we tie up two of our largest tanks at our brewpub to make it. That means we lose an entire turn of two fermenters when we are making Pliny the Younger. This is why we cannot make more Pliny the Younger at this time. We pretty much brewed the same amount of Younger as last year; I allocated a little more to the pub and less to distribution.
Many have emailed me asking why we don’t bottle the Younger; we still brew all the Pliny the Younger at our brewpub. Our bottling equipment is at our production brewery and we do not have a way to transport carbonated beer to our production brewery for bottling. If we decide to add another fermenter to our production brewery later this year we will have more flexibility and would hopefully make a larger batch their while still brewing some at our pub for the pub.
At the end of the day all I did was set out to make a great beer! As I said above, six years we started making Pliny the Younger, each year it has improved steadily (in my opinion). I now know how the monks feel at Westvleteren; I remember going to Westvleteren 10 years ago when you could buy a maximum of 10 cases. They figured out a system as we will to. We will learn from the 2010 Pliny the Younger release.
All and all I guess my point is this (facetiously), if I made crap beer, we wouldn’t be having this problem. All I want to do is make excellent beer for consumers to drink. We don’t plan on growing and growing and growing our business. It isn’t our style. (Never say never though as I learned from my good friend Sam) This is as much a lifestyle for Natalie and I, if you have been to Sonoma County you know that we live and brew in God’s country; it truly is an amazing place to live and brew! With that said, and as I said above, if we do add another tank to our production brewery we will consider making a large batch of Younger there as well as at the pub. If we do this we will consider bottling it or filling 5 liter mini-kegs, we’ll see as Natalie and I digest this all. We also might just have our retail license for our production brewery by next year, if we do, we would consider working our production brewery into the equation as a pick up location for beer. This would take some massive planning though as we don’t have a whole lot of parking there and we have several neighboring business that we do not want to disrupt.
Again, we appreciate everyone patience’s on Friday, we are sorry for the long lines, and we are sorry that we ran short on beer. We still welcome your feedback (info@rrbeer.com) and want to thank you for your time and your support. The info@rrbeer email does go straight to my computer.
Finally, we will take what we have learned this year and use it to better next year’s release.
Thanks again,
Vinnie
Posted on February 8th, 2010 | Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off