Hunahpu's Day is no more

Yakima 728
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kuemmelbrau said:
i think they could afford it...

he decided to refund everyone’s money, at a cost of $175,000 to CCB. (The brewery still raked in $324,000 in sales.)
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I assume that's gross revenue, not net. And of course they can afford it, but the question is how much will it make them compared to the effort. And once you factor in all the money you need to spend to make an event good, it's less obvious that they should do it.
 
stupac2 said:
I assume that's gross revenue, not net. And of course they can afford it, but the question is how much will it make them compared to the effort. And once you factor in all the money you need to spend to make an event good, it's less obvious that they should do it.
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Yeah, I'm sure they lost money there.
 
Brez07 said:
I am surprised more breweries don't do releases like Allagash. Just ****ing put it on the shelves and tell people on social media it's there, along with the bottle limit per person.

And IF they decide to do an event, they a) define bottle limit beforehand b) have you line up outside the brewery and c) check ID and provide a numbered ticket when you go in. Hang out a bit, play some games/get some samples, then they start the sales by calling out blocks of 10 people at a time. No bitching, no faking tickets (seriously Florida, WTF?), no long lines inside to get samples. And they give you free coffee and donuts!
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Compare Allagash releases to Florida releases, or, hell, even VT releases. Is it surprising the beer doesn't trade well? It's practically pleasant to do it.
 
Read first few posts and realized I don't care enough to read more. These release days remind me of the ******** on BA who ***** and moan about such events, all while living about 2,000 miles from the brewery, and never have any intention of ever wasting their time going to one.

/grumpy old man rant.
 
stupac2 said:
I assume that's gross revenue, not net. And of course they can afford it, but the question is how much will it make them compared to the effort. And once you factor in all the money you need to spend to make an event good, it's less obvious that they should do it.
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i'm willing to bet that they made close to the 324000 mentioned. lets see, they didn't pay for security or staff, they didn't pay for food, they didn't pay for at least 1/2 the beer served, they didn't pay to put up fences, they didn't pay for place rental. keep in mind they took in 320000$ just from the regular huna sales. other than a few tens of thousands for permits/ porta potty rentals/ the beer they brewed. i think most of what they take in is profit.
 
It will be interesting to see what the fallout from his is in the Tampa area going forward. Does someone else try to set up a big festival (without any kind of bottle release) as an anchor for Tampa Beer Week on that Saturday? I know I would personally come back down for something like what the first couple of hours of Huna Day were, and I'd gladly pay $100 for it. But the question is if anyone would even go to the effort to try and get something like that off the ground.
 
Usofar said:
Florida's been faking ballots for so long fake ticketing was clearly the next step. If the federal government can't stop it how can CCB?
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sacrelicio said:
One thing I don't get is why counterfeit tickets were such a big deal this year. Did word get out that they wouldn't be scanned or something? I just don't see how someone would be able to sell hundreds or thousands of tickets without a tip.
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I was wondering about this too. It makes you wonder if "counterfeit tickets" isn't really just a code for, "we grossly oversold."
 
mdillon86 said:
I was wondering about this too. It makes you wonder if "counterfeit tickets" isn't really just a code for, "we grossly oversold."
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Yeah, everyone kept saying that there were twice as many people as there should have been...maybe they accidentally doubled their ticket count? Not that a bunch of sweaty, confused people drinking all day would be great at counting ;)
 
Keep in mind it was dead-easy to sneak in along the periphery by cutting right just before the "entrance" along the back of the food truck area, on the CCB side of that big trench. From there you could get all the way to the pouring bus. I did this at one point to get back out to my car and then back in so I could bring some growlers over to the bottle share. Obviously I had a legitimate ticket and only "snuck in" to avoid having to try and fight my way through the crowd. But I imagine plenty of people snuck in for real that way. Tons of people back there bottle sharing and hanging out in camp chairs.
 
kuemmelbrau said:
i'm willing to bet that they made close to the 324000 mentioned. lets see, they didn't pay for security or staff, they didn't pay for food, they didn't pay for at least 1/2 the beer served, they didn't pay to put up fences, they didn't pay for place rental. keep in mind they took in 320000$ just from the regular huna sales. other than a few tens of thousands for permits/ porta potty rentals/ the beer they brewed. i think most of what they take in is profit.
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The beer costs money to brew too. There's also staff time for planning and execution, which isn't cheap. It's really hard to know how much they made without actually having access to their financials.
 
I know this: Coast brewing, which is a tiny South Carolina operation in comparison to what Cigar City is, manages to (with assistance of course) put on a 1500 person beer festival with all-you-can-drink taps, tons of porta potties, food trucks, and transferable tickets every year, at a ticket cost of $65. I've only been the last two years (apparently the previous year had some issues that I didn't see, many related to designated driver tickets that were abused and gotten rid of) but both times I've gone it has basically ran as smoothly as can be. If that kind of thing can be effectively managed in South Carolina, surely someone in Tampa can run a festival two or even three times that size and make a profit off of it. Does anyone think, with everything else surrounding Tampa Beer Week, they couldn't sell thousands of tickets at $100 a piece for what CCB offered on Saturday, minus the bottle sales but also minus the overcrowding? I'd pay for that.
 
I'm also curious if Cigar City did any sort of research into beer festivals before deciding on the logistics of this. At the aforementioned Brewvival, there were three separate queues to get in, each one featuring multiple volunteers to scan tickets, check ids, hand out glasses, etc. for 1500 attendees. at Huna Day there was one, maybe you could call it two queues when they "scanned" (or took) your ticket, put not one but two wristbands on you, and passed out sheets and glassware, for over twice as many "official" attendees. It didn't register with me at the time since there was almost no wait to get in when I did, but the scale didn't even come close to matching what I've seen at other festivals. Heck, I've seen a better entrance process for a 500 person event; this was over 10 times as many.
 
Whoa, kinda glad I spent my weekend in Florida attending the Funky Buddha Nib Smuggler release (very well organized) and going fishing in SoFla.

... sounds like I dodged a bullet, lol.
 
♪ ♪ Cigar City is a mean old swamp witch
Makin' me wait, takin' my money
Ain't give me no taste of that spicy chocolate honey ♪ ♪
 
mdillon86 said:
I was wondering about this too. It makes you wonder if "counterfeit tickets" isn't really just a code for, "we grossly oversold."
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exactly, with hundreds of various ticketed events happening in every state every day, Hunahpu's Day is where some evil mastermind decides to make their big score? I've yet to see claims of unusual amounts of tickets being sold on Craigslist, ebay or Stubhub. I've yet to see anybody on any of the beer forums or Facebook say that they were told that when their secondary market ticket was scanned it was coming up as a duplicate/fake. How would anybody know in advance that they would stop scanning tickets and just let people in? And if a ticket was scanned as a duplicate, they would still et people in? Once it was known tickets weren't being scanned, with only a few hours left in the event, do they think all of a sudden a 1000 people mobilized and rushed to Kinko's to make copies? Where are the reports of scalpers selling piles of tickets outside the front gate? Seems like this fake ticket kingpin is the fallguy.

Occam's razor - if there were a few thousand extra tickets, they were probably produced/distributed by CCB and handed out to friends/family of the brewery. I'm sure the inner circle/hangers on for CCB is quite large.
 
stupac2 said:
The beer costs money to brew too. There's also staff time for planning and execution, which isn't cheap. It's really hard to know how much they made without actually having access to their financials.
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I'm willing to bet with the wonderful 'planning' and 'execution' of this past weekend that they didn't pay much for that either. and keep in mind the 'staff' would be working that day anyway... just doing a different job.
 
The debacle at CCB is 100% on CCB. Not the ******** that exploited a problem. If you are going to sell tickets that guarantees the holder a product, you are responsible for accounting and tracking the redemption of those tickets. It amazes me how bad some of these breweries can F-up these release events. ******** are always going to be ********. And what do ******** do? They take shits! It is the breweries responsibility to minimize how and where they take that dump. CCB's event management was the equivalent of an All-You-Can-Eat Chinese buffet in a crappy neighborhood, three hours after the lunch rush, with an out of order sign on the men's room and the single stall in the women's that barely flushes due to too many feminine hygiene products clogging it... That shits going to be overflowing before you know it.
 
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Naively (to the least), I was thinking this event was going to set a standard for how to handle brewery-only releases in the future that everyone would want to emulate: tickets, tons of great beers on tap, a managed crowd size, being able to relax when it comes to things like bottle pickups due to guaranteed allotments and accounting for how many bottles were available per ticket sold, a huge bottle share that wouldn't even be necessary because there was so much beer to drink from the taps, and a whole day of relaxed fun. It's utterly amazing how wrong I was.
 
dc55110 said:
The debacle at CCB is 100% on CCB. Not the ******** that exploited a problem. If you are going to sell tickets that guarantees the holder a product, you are responsible for accounting and tracking the redemption of those tickets. It amazes me how bad some of these breweries can F-up these release events. ******** are always going *******. And what do ******** do? They take a shits! It is the breweries responsibility to minimize how and where they take that dump. CCB's event management was the equivalent of an All-You-Can-Eat Chinese buffet in a crappy neighborhood, three hours after the lunch rush, with an out of order sign on the men's room and the single stall in the women's that barely flushes due to too many feminine hygiene products clogging it... That shits going to be overflowing before you know it.
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Tyrone-Biggums_zps8a10898d.png

Wait, so are ******** going to ******* or are ******** going to ****?
 
JulianB said:
Naively (to the least), I was thinking this event was going to set a standard for how to handle brewery-only releases in the future that everyone would want to emulate: tickets, tons of great beers on tap, a managed crowd size, being able to relax when it comes to things like bottle pickups due to guaranteed allotments and accounting for how many bottles were available per ticket sold, a huge bottle share that wouldn't even be necessary because there was so much beer to drink from the taps, and a whole day of relaxed fun. It's utterly amazing how wrong I was.
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In regards of how to run a brewery only release they gotta take a page from Lost Abbey. Sure, the site was a mess for DDG, but the day of release was possibly the easiest beer release I've ever attended. So simple and easy. Had they merged all 4 sessions in 1 it might've taken me 5 minutes to get my beer instead of the 30 seconds it otherwise took.
 
kuemmelbrau said:
I'm willing to bet with the wonderful 'planning' and 'execution' of this past weekend that they didn't pay much for that either. and keep in mind the 'staff' would be working that day anyway... just doing a different job.
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Well, if you're right that the staff for the event was solely brewery staff, then no ****ing wonder it went to ****. Even a complete idiot should know that it takes more people to handle a few thousand people than it does to handle a regular brewery crowd.
 
JulianB said:
Naively (to the least), I was thinking this event was going to set a standard for how to handle brewery-only releases in the future that everyone would want to emulate: tickets, tons of great beers on tap, a managed crowd size, being able to relax when it comes to things like bottle pickups due to guaranteed allotments and accounting for how many bottles were available per ticket sold, a huge bottle share that wouldn't even be necessary because there was so much beer to drink from the taps, and a whole day of relaxed fun. It's utterly amazing how wrong I was.
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I thought the same thing. For example with the more limited stuff (DB Huna, DB Hunapoopoo), I thought for sure they knew how popular these beers would be and as a result they would brew enough to give out plenty. But that didn't turn out to be the case.
 
pgh_penguins said:
Grab two cases, I'll drive to your house with $ and make you dinner.
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Assuming things work the same way they did last year (as in us getting something like 20+ cases), consider it done. You also don't need to make dinner but if you make it down we'll have a big bottleshare/homebrew day/hangout.
 
rsths13 said:
I thought the same thing. For example with the more limited stuff (DB Huna, DB Hunapoopoo), I thought for sure they knew how popular these beers would be and as a result they would brew enough to give out plenty. But that didn't turn out to be the case.
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Of all the places CCB ****ed up, not having enough of a beer isn't one of them. Every major beer event has special tappings that you just have to be in the right place at the right time to enjoy. They cant/don't produce these in the quantity to make sure everyone gets plenty or even some at all. Nothing wrong with that. Even the less desirable beers from the less desirable breweries didn't last half the day.

If you go to Hunahpu, DLD, or any of these huge beer events and expect to be able to sample every single beer you want you have the wrong expectations.
 
johnnyramirez said:
But did you like it more than Red Wine or JD?
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The Cali Brandy? I didn't have it at the same time so it's hard to say. My opinion on which BA Cake I liked the best went back and forth depending on what kind of mood I was in, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Three very good beers, all similar in some ways and different in others.

I really hope this year's BAMC release goes smoothly like last year's (maybe without the rain) and isn't a ******** like what happened on Saturday. I have a feeling that it's going to be way worse than last year though, now that people know the beers are actually good and they trade well. I expect to see a ton of mules.
 

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