a king in the world of beer raters. go to ratebeer and search his name. the man is an animal!!!! cheers Jens!

quote: Originally posted by bluesandbarbq Welcome back!

Ditto!

Yeah...agreed. When you can get Abyss for $12, why spend $25-35 on these? The only reason I've had them the last two years is because a friend (who is fully aware I will never pay for another again) buys "futures" where you get a decent discount by paying for half of whatever allotmant you want the year before and half when the bottles come out. I've absolutely LOVED the grand cru, the Iced, and the Elijah Cragig 20, but those are all well over $30. The $25-30 are in the good but not great range. No thanks.

$30 bucks for that beer is high, but you have to consider the cost of travel/barrel expense, etc. Truckee is a blip of a tiny town in east Cali, way up about 6k feet. It's gotta take a good chunk of change to get shipped. Plus their production is realtively small. Even at the brewery a bottle of this will run ~$20 with tax (this was about 2 years ago or so when I bought my last bottle). I think it's a fine beer and alway stop there on my way to Reno (I dig their rye IPA and usually get a few pints of that). But if IMO, if you can land BCS I would gladly pay the $20 for those 4 bottles over 1 $30 bottle of BA Eclipse. Your opinion of it being overpriced, to me, is spot on. But what cool beer of the moment isn't? Hell, they just got done selling futures for the beer it's so popular now.

You can get a decent bottle of Bourbon for a bit more than that and make your own "Bourbon" Stout.

quote: Originally posted by bluesandbarbq You can get a decent bottle of Bourbon for a bit more than that and make your own "Bourbon" Stout.

I did just that recently - brewed an imperial porter and aged it on bourbon soaked American oak. Tons of vanilla and lots of bourbon on the nose. I yielded 54 bottles in a 5 gallon+ batch at a total cost of just over $1 a bottle. Agreed on the comments, and I did gather that FiftyFifty was a small operation. I watched the futures insanity - like bruery reserve and the new hill farmstead "membership" it is getting rather old. A buddy is a reserve society member and Monday 50 cases of chocolate rain was released for sale online. I wanted a bottle for my brothers wedding - it sold in one minute...

NONE of the Eclipse line is $20 at the Brewery anymore, not even the cheaper variations. They charge as much as the retailers that have it. A lot of places do that, but it bugs me. If a store can sell a beer at X amount, with the distributor and the retailer getting a cut and everyone making a profit, you should be able to get it from the source for less. Maaaaybe the very cheapest Eclipse is $22-23, if you buy it a year ahead of time. I go there every once and a while, just don't buy bottled Eclipse anymore. I get that a smaller remote place has to charge a little more, but a couple years ago, a bomber of Bourbon County was $10...so a little more would be $12-13, not $25-35. But, as long as they CAN get that much (and they do), more power to em. They just won't be getting it from me.

I've enjoyed quite a few, so far it's cost me $0.00 total......very generous friends in my area. No way I'd pay anywhere close to those prices for a bottle of beer.