We headed down to Tampa for Cigar City’s release of Hunahpu.  This is no ordinary bottle release — this is their most sought-after beer, the line starts forming up the night before, and if you’re lucky enough to get any at all, you only get three bottles.  In short, it’s more of a festival than a bottle release.

So we got a hotel a few blocks away, and I planned to get up at 5am and walk over.  I couldn’t sleep (strange bed or anticipation?), so I gave up shortly before 4am and headed over.  There was a small line already, with most of the people camped out, and I estimated I was about 75th in line.  There was a steady trickle of people joining the line, which quickly stretched down the block and into the parking lot of the shopping center around the corner.  So they wound up handing out the golden wristbands early (prompting lots of panicked phone calls to people who were supposed to join people in line), and they opened the gates just after 7am.

Cigar City blocked off their parking lot, and setup several trailers to serve beer, in addition to the two bars normally operating in their tasting room.  There were about a dozen food trucks, a few merch booths, live music, and some tents and carnival-style amusements way in the back by their new brewhouse.  The taplist was very impressive.  Everybody was in a good and accommodating mood.

The only problem was the size: there were just too many people in too small a space.  Lines for everything were long, snaking around and into the end of other lines.  Navigating the space was difficult because the lines were taking up so much space.  The police showed up shortly after 6am — I thought they were going to complain about people walking in the street, or drinking on the sidewalk, but they were apparently upset about the line winding around the block, which prompted the early opening.

They’ve already said the event is too big to hold at the brewery, and might be held at a larger venue or spread over several days.  But other than having a larger space, I think there are a couple of other things they might do to help make things go more smoothly:

• Post the master taplist — I was having my first glass of Hunahpu in the tasting room, when someone at my table noticed a folded-up piece of paper which turned out to be the master taplist.  This was an invaluable source of information for us to figure out which of the serving points had which beers.  Without this, you would have to walk up to each one and read the paper taplist at the bar to figure out where to go.  Maybe this doesn’t get sorted out soon enough to be printed up and handed out to everyone.  But posting it online, or even setting up a bulletin board somewhere so people could consult it would be nice.
• They required tokens instead of cash for all the outside bars, which definitely sped up service.  But they were letting people get samples and several drinks per person at a time, both of which slow things down.  Of course, more space and more service points is the real solution to the problem.
• I’m also not a big fan of first-come-first-served-line-around-the-block as a strategy for rare bottle releases.  I think it would make a lot more sense to have a lottery for tickets.  Or auction off a portion of the bottles and/or tickets.  Maybe a combination of all three — they could have a first-come-first-served ticket sale for a majority of the tickets, and then an auction and/or lottery for the rest.  But whatever the method, selling tickets ahead of time would make it much easier to plan for the number of people who were coming.