Monthly Archives: March 2014

Hunahpu Day 2014: A Fullsome Apology & Some Unsolicited Advice

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When I got home, I had an apology from Cigar City waiting for me in my email:

So, today did not go as expected. We realize that there were a lot of issues with duplicate tickets, way too long waits in lines, and all of that. We can promise 100% that we are going to make it right, whether it be refund, or whether we brew a batch of beer that we will bottle and make completely free to all attendees that had issues today. We’re completely sorry for all issues that happened today. It really sucked. We completely understand how much it sucked and hate how much it sucked. We don’t want it to suck ever again. We will do what we can to make it right.

I don’t expect anyone, lest of all craft brewers, to be perfect.  It is a lot more important to me that they recognize when they’ve made mistakes and do better next time.  So this apology goes a long way to making things right for me.  And for the record, things went well-enough for me today:

  • I showed up shortly before 11am (as encouraged by Cigar City on twitter, etc.) and I had to wait more than 45 minutes to get in.  This is longer than I would have liked, but tolerable.
  • I bought my three bottles that I was allotted based on entry to the festival, plus another case.  But I spent several hours standing in line to accomplish this (and there were a ton of people around me in the scrum who still had their wristbands, meaning they hadn’t gotten their 3 bottle allotment yet).
  • I was very happy with the changes in procedure this year.  There were many more pouring stations, the small pours made it a lot easier to try more beers, and not having to pay each time made things flow much more quickly.

That said, the lines were still crazy, and there were just too many people for the space.  The last time I looked at the line to get in to Hunahpu Day was around 1:30pm (because I was basically in line for bottles the rest of the time I was there), and the line was still around the corner, down the block and out of sight.  I’m willing to bet many of those people didn’t even get in until it was too late to get bottles they were promised.

As 4pm rolled around, the crowd of people in front of the packaging hall started to get worried that there weren’t going to be enough cases to go around (or any cases at all, as one person said as they passed back through the line with their 3 bottles).  Everybody was still being nice, but some people were clearly spooked.  It all turned out fine for me, and I hope Cigar City can make everybody happy.  But it could easily have been much worse.

So, for the advice: please move this event.  I’m sure it’s great to have a huge festival at the brewery for many reasons, but there just isn’t enough space to do it responsibly.  There’s a giant football stadium right down the road with a gigantic parking lot — maybe they could help you out?  I’m sure there are a ton of other larger venues in town that could handle 3,500 people much more gracefully.  Because there was plenty of beer.  There were plenty of pouring stations.  There was plenty of goodwill and good cheer.  But there was simply not enough room.

Update: Just to clarify: by “plenty of beer” above, I mean there were plenty of beers on tap and pretty reasonable lines for those.  I don’t know how many bottles of Hunahpu there were, but I suspect there were enough for everybody who bought a ticket to get their allotted 3 bottles, and for there to be some cases left over for people to at least have a chance to buy more.  I don’t think it was a shortage of beer that caused the problems today — it was the lack of space and lack of active management of the bottle line.

El Catador Club

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The initial run of Cigar City’s reserve society, El Catador Club, has come to an end.  It lasted about 7 months, with one bottle each of 5 barrel-aged beers included in the $120 membership price, plus opportunities to buy additional bottles of those and a few other beers, first dibs on buying tickets for Hunahpu Day, and a t-shirt.  There were also some other goodies I didn’t make much use of, such as member-only growler fills at the taproom, discounts on purchases at the taproom, etc.

We wound up buying a total of 12 bottles of 7 different beers:

  • Forgotten Island – a 15% monster quad, with a ton of rummy sweetness melding well with the standard quad profile of raisins and plums.
  • 110K+OT Batch #6 – a good mix of raspberry tartness and roasty dry coffee
  • Illuminating the Path – like an IPA that’s been aged until it became a sour porter — just a hint of sourness.  Very divisive in the reviews I’ve seen.  I really liked this, but there are a lot of people who hate it too.
  • Don Gavino’s Big Guava – nice and fruity, not overwhelmingly sour, but a good tartness to it.
  • Good Gourd Almighty – I don’t like regular Good Gourd much, and I’m not a big fan of pumpkin beers in general (I find they usually taste more like a spice rack than pumpkin).  But this was really nice — a lot of the overly sweet, vanilla flavor is softened and it wound up being a pretty nice fall beer.
  • Amplitude – very tasty, very boozy and sweet.  The sales were put on hold at first when Lactobacillus was found by their QA process.  But the bottles were saved by pasteurization.
  • Double Barrel Hunahpu – black and boozy, little bit of chile heat and rich chocolate.  Even more intense than Hunahpu, though the sweetness is moderated a little too.

Overall, we are very happy with the first round of El Catador Club, and will probably sign up for the next round.  The biggest benefit was being able to buy beer online and pick it up when it was convenient for us.  This is a huge improvement over the usual system of having only a few days notice and having to stand in line.  And in many cases, having the special beer run out before we got any (this happened more than once in the last couple of years).

The price wound up being about $20 per bottle, which seems very reasonable for high-gravity, small batch, barrel-aged beers.  And they have already announced that the second round will have its own website to automate buying and picking up beers — this will be a big improvement over the current system of buying on a third-party website and signing off on the beers being picked up in a huge binder in the tasting room.

The one addition we’d like to see in the second round is inclusion of some of Cigar City’s harder-to-find seasonal beers.  They may be easier to find in Tampa, but Cucumber, Big Sound, and especially Marshall Zhukov are very hard to find in Gainesville.  We called every bottle shop in town within a few hours of hearing about Marshall Zhukov being released, and nobody had any left.  Even with some of their more common beers, like their new Hopped on the High Seas IPA series, we weren’t able to find any of the first few batches in Gainesville (one shop told me their distributor laughed at them when they asked if they would be getting any).  So we would love the chance to buy a few bottles of those online and pick them up at the tasting room.