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.
“A man stood on the street corner near Cigar City's entrance, holding a fistful of counterfeit tickets for the price of $10 each. Groups of people hopped fences or sneaked through the line without even producing a ticket,” writes Justin Grant for the Tampa Bay Times.
The brewery apologized on Facebook, invited everyone to drink for free at the taproom the next day, and said they would issue full refunds to everyone who bought valid tickets.
In moments like these, I find myself gravitating more to the culture of homebrewing, a simpler world now, in which amateurs and fanatics can brew beer for themselves and share with family and friends. Some of it is high quality; others are misses, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all part of a learning curve anyway. The focus is on education, enjoyment, and giving feedback to fellow homebrewers. There’s no pressure to try the latest thing or to brew yet another version of an IPA to meet market demands.
Certainly not all craft beer events disintegrate into beer fans pounding their fists against the garage door at a brewery, booing and chanting when a beer runs out. It was just one day. It doesn’t account for the thousands of pints of Jai Alai IPA poured and enjoyed every day or the work that Cigar City has done in advancing Florida’s craft beer scene.
But still, I worry about what days like this say about the state of our craft beer culture. America is arguably the most exciting country in the world to be brewing and drinking beer right now, due largely to the passionate, adventurous consumers whose support allows breweries the freedom to experiment and innovate. Even though consumers who sell counterfeit tickets and hop fences to get beer may be a minority, passion and devotion seem to be blurring more than ever with greed and single-minded obsessions.
As for Hunahpu, it has seen its last Day.
“I am acknowledging defeat,” Cigar City founder Joey Redner told The Full Pint. “That was the last Hunahpu’s Day. The beer will go into distribution next year and—hopefully—spread out among many accounts, it will get to consumers more fairly.”
Fairly is the key word there. In a market where there is more of a demand for a product than there is to go around, nothing might ever seem fair. But breweries can do the best they can—Redner said he might hold a beer festival next year in place of Hunahpu’s Day, which would at least offer more structure and security—and beer consumers could focus on the enjoyment of beer, not the entitled ownership of it. It could, and should, be a much simpler story with a happier ending.