Why is Chicago your personal bogeyman for everything in the beer world? Is it 100%
jegross2's fault?
If you come out I promise I'll let you sample from the bottles I Ragnar'd from your countrymen with my Bramble reserves.
I give Florida their fair share as well.
Chicago represents all of the absurdity of beer trading, stockpiling, hypocrisy, and double standards and thereby the 312 lends Itself as a straw man simply by way of contrast. I really don't give a **** either way, I like revolution beers a lot and trade for them. I don't like fruited stout variants and ostracize the hype surrounding them as my palate sees fit.
Chicago is anomalous in that it is a huge metro area that has relatively few brewery only releases so their off shelf offerings become de facto whales, notwithstanding price, avaialabity or limits. 320 bottle cahutlow? Your 340 bottle CFHx2 sounds about right. This is well tread ground. The excesses of CA bottle pricing met with the rapacious demand of that metro area create hilarious results.
Plus the sheer drama and spectacle during releases, the competitive nature, long term cellaring of beers clearly not meant for that treatment, readily available caricatures, misinformation, wild speculation and devaluation of other beer releases on other coasts, and a general lack of transparency dont even get me mad. The rhetoric is as thick and delicious as Alfredo fett so I just spin my fork in it.
The ca scene is a universal punching bag in the opposite direction. People freely consent to trade away world class, vastly more limited bottles that cost upwards of 2x$4$ and that is their prerogative. No one dies as a result. **** gets done and its doesn't matter if someone offers up VSB for CCK, California traders just bite deep on the pillow and accept their fate.
I can't bother the PNw at all. Their breweries are top notch and I have never had problems, excepting the horrible AftW nightmare of 2011, because their traders are staggeringly generous. Bbomb and KDs are better than most midwes offerings, they see limited distro and PNw traders just ship them away sight unseen.
HT traders use those cans as a universal Currency and enjoy that dogecoin that I can't really argue with. The rest of the northeast is afflicted with small bottle runs so I don't really conflict because in all my trades they seem genuinely generous with things that have low bottle runs. It's when dipshits drive up to HF from Like, Pennsylvania, that the transplant **** kicks in.
My take on Florida is not skewed by loweballz. There are some genuinely desired releases and some traders seem to acquire quite a bit. It's a hybrid of the Pennsylvania HF poachers coupled with the 312 rapacity. But the normal people are awesome so it evens out.
Tl;dr the extreme Chicago examples his personify the worst in trading and are thereby easier to satirize. Low hanging fruit at the expense of a huge metro area.