Hunahpu's Day is no more

[sacrelicio]

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 *****! 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 ***** going to be overflowing before you know it.

I don't remember what article I read this in yesterday, but...

The owner of Cigar City said this (I'm paraphrasing): "We thought craft beer was 99% *******-free, but I guess we were wrong."

Holy ******* blame shift.

 

[JulianB1]

Fundamentally, all the fault for what happened lies with CCB. Yes, individuals are at fault for their specific micro-actions, such as any violence, theft, and so on. But the overall problems of the day all trace their root cause to the crowd being larger than what it was supposed to be, and that is totally on the event host, not the attendees.

 

[tehzachatak]

I don't remember what article I read this in yesterday, but...

The owner of Cigar City said this (I'm paraphrasing): "We thought craft beer was 99% *******-free, but I guess we were wrong."

Holy ******* blame shift.

I love how this quickly went from:

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.

Which I interpreted as a mea culpa-

To blaming literally everyone besides themselves. What an absolute joke. Yes, there were issues with ticket resellers. Yes, some people were ********. Nevertheless, lots and lots of people have figured out how to hold large, ticketed events with substantial alcohol consumption involved without it turning into a shitshow. Apparently, those people just don't understand how hard Hannypoo's day is and how it's so special and how there are so many special challenges. Give me a ******* break.

 

[ridglens]

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA they sold "3500" tickets and think people created/sold a fake 4-6000? HAHAHAHAHHAHAH

i don't buy that **** for a second. They "saw it early", so they just ignored it until they ran out of beer? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH scanning on iphones... spared no expense on that one...

"We had 16000 bottles and let in 8000 people to buy 3 each, seemed like a good idea at the time"....


Good Lord, Three Floyds is the damn standard setter...

 

[JulianB1]

I'm not one to start making any sort of demands, but I would really like to hear from Cigar City exactly how many tickets were distributed, and why they had thousands of extra wristbands ready on-site. The one thing that would really piss me off would be to hear that they advertised this as a 3500 person event when they actually sold (or handed out on the sly) thousands of extra tickets. Now I realize that I shouldn't be complaining given that I admitted to having had a great time, and only decided to go at the last minute, but part of the mental calculus I did when making that impulse decision was thinking about how many beers were on tap relative to the number of attendees. It looked pretty reasonable to me. Had I known in advance that it was going to be that setup for twice as many people, I might not have bothered. But again, it worked out for me (drinking-wise) so this is more wanting answers to this so that others see them.

 

[sacrelicio]

I love how this quickly went from:



Which I interpreted as a mea culpa-

To blaming literally everyone besides themselves. What an absolute joke. Yes, there were issues with ticket resellers. Yes, some people were ********. Nevertheless, lots and lots of people have figured out how to hold large, ticketed events with substantial alcohol consumption involved without it turning into a shitshow. Apparently, those people just don't understand how hard Hannypoo's day is and how it's so special and how there are so many special challenges. Give me a ******* break.

Even that initial response sounded weird, like woe is me martyrdom or something.

 

[sacrelicio]

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA they sold "3500" tickets and think people created/sold a fake 4-6000? HAHAHAHAHHAHAH

i don't buy that **** for a second. They "saw it early", so they just ignored it until they ran out of beer? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH scanning on iphones... spared no expense on that one...

"We had 16000 bottles and let in 8000 people to buy 3 each, seemed like a good idea at the time"....


Good Lord, Three Floyds is the damn standard setter...

Yeah, hats off to the counterfeit ticket ring that was able to pull off thievery of that magnitude. It's like the ******* Lufthansa heist of beer festivals.

 

[tehzachatak]

Good Lord, Three Floyds is the damn standard setter...

That's seriously the most insane thing about all of this. People are holding up Dark Lord Day as an example of what to do right. It's amazing how far we can fall, I guess?

 

[RandallPinkFloyd]

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA they sold "3500" tickets and think people created/sold a fake 4-6000? HAHAHAHAHHAHAH

i don't buy that **** for a second. They "saw it early", so they just ignored it until they ran out of beer? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH scanning on iphones... spared no expense on that one...

"We had 16000 bottles and let in 8000 people to buy 3 each, seemed like a good idea at the time"....


Good Lord, Three Floyds is the damn standard setter...

At this point, I'm guessing, they can't admit how many "I got you covered bro" tickets they handed out for fear of the city/fire marshall/zoning/kharma coming after them for large fines or whatever. and I'm sure they're already being scrutinized by the city.

 

[sacrelicio]

That's seriously the most insane thing about all of this. People are holding up Dark Lord Day as an example of what to do right. It's amazing how far we can fall, I guess?

Well, after a couple **** shows, they made major changes and now the event runs well. Plus they started dating their bottles! Hats off to them.

 

[gtx281]

******** are always going to be ********. And what do ******** do? They take *****! It is the breweries responsibility to minimize how and where they take that dump.

 

[rsths13]

Of all the places CCB ****** 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.

I disagree. Everyone wanted to try those beers, which led to crazy lines and frustration. A simple online poll would have told them which beers people really wanted to try that day. I understand some beers are more limited/rare and they will run out, but if they had planned to serve larger quantities then I think some of the craziness might have been avoided. It just seems that if so many people want to try a beer your advertising for a special event, and you know the exact number of expected attendees then you'll do your best to let as many of those people as possible try those beers. Especially since you're the host of the event.

I think the best example of this is Peg's/Cycle. Doug always seems to brew enough of his BA beers to take care of a lot of people at their special events. Do kegs kick? Yes. Do they kick in 15 minutes and leave a lot of people disappointed? No.

And for full disclosure, I got pours of the beers I wanted to try since my friends and I split up to go to different lines.

 

[JulianB1]

One of the CCB guys responded on BA:

http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...-day-march-8-2014.117839/page-49#post-2236866

"the problem is that no matter who is organizing it, you can't control the actual people who get in. you can control the number, but there will still be plenty of people who want to take advantage of rare bottles and will fight to get them if they see a profit. and with a smaller number of tickets, the chances to take advantage of a hungry secondary market increase even more, either through entry to the fest or through bottles after the fest."

Sorry, but this is complete BS designed yet again to push responsibility off of CCB for the main **** up - too many people - and on to the people who attended. What he doesn't get is that there would not have been any fighting among "people who want to take advantage of rare bottles" if they had stuck to their alleged attendance limit, because everyone who wanted bottles (profiteers or otherwise) would have gotten them with no issues. As far as the part about a smaller number of tickets increasing the chance to "take advantage of a hungry secondary market", don't make me laugh. Number of tickets to an event needs to be dictated by capacity concerns, not by a secondary resale market they have never shown an inclination to care about before.

"- this one [selling DBH] was all my decision. there were a couple of reasons for this, none of which really help things in retrospect. 1) the element of surprise was to avoid crazy lines for the DBH when we already knew there'd be crazy lines for Hunahpu's. 2) the case limit was to get through them fast so they don't last the entire day and there's yet another endlessly long line. 3) the 11am thing is probably the toughest to understand, and for that i accept 100% responsibility on ******* that up. when we told people not to arrive early, what we were really meaning to say is "don't camp overnight/show up at 5am." as most people know we've gotten in trouble in the past for having crazy long lines. again, it's one of those situations where you're damned if you're do and damned if you don't. there was going to be a long line regardless, and we should've planned better on limiting it. "

Funnily enough this part seems to be where he's the most contrite, yet I actually agree with him. CCB wanted to quickly get rid of a ton of leftover beer (or however you want to describe it), and if they had enforced some 1 or 2 bottle per person limit, it would have just led to another enormous line on a day that already had too many of them. One thing a lot of beer geeks don't seem to get is that for breweries, moving product quickly to both generate revenue and open up space is a more important consideration than worrying about whether or not people are going to get butthurt over issues of "fairness" and so on.

 

[franch]

He's right though.

JD>RW>Cali Huna>AB

All fantastic beers though

AB>>>>>JD>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Huna>>Cali Huna>>>OG Cake

haven't had RW

 

[JulianB1]

http://tbo.com/events/cigar-city-no-more-hunahpu-day-release-parties-20140310/

“We may still do some sort of fest,” Redner said. “We will just be offering the beer. We won't have the bottle release component.”

 

[dc55110]

One of the CCB guys responded on BA:

http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...-day-march-8-2014.117839/page-49#post-2236866

Here is another response from him:

"i have no doubt we could've done something better, but the scanning system was a joke and sorting out the real from the fake would have been even more incredibly time-consuming and would have screwed even more people from getting in. i don't want to imagine the hoard at the gates had we prevented everyone from getting in."

Well if the system was a joke how do you go into it relying on it? "Hey these don't work! There is no way we will be able to scan all the tickets... Let's roll with it anyway, what could possibly go wrong?!?!"

 

[drgarage1]

Here is another response from him:

"i have no doubt we could've done something better, but the scanning system was a joke and sorting out the real from the fake would have been even more incredibly time-consuming and would have screwed even more people from getting in. i don't want to imagine the hoard at the gates had we prevented everyone from getting in."

Well if the system was a joke how do you go into it relaying on it? "Hey these don't work! There is no way we will be able to scan all the tickets... Let's roll with it anyway, what could possibly go wrong?!?!"

What an absurdity -- scans of QR codes works for everyone else, but the fact that his team was incompetent at it makes the system bad.

 

[GetchaPull]

Here is another response from him:

"i have no doubt we could've done something better, but the scanning system was a joke and sorting out the real from the fake would have been even more incredibly time-consuming and would have screwed even more people from getting in. i don't want to imagine the hoard at the gates had we prevented everyone from getting in."

Well if the system was a joke how do you go into it relying on it? "Hey these don't work! There is no way we will be able to scan all the tickets... Let's roll with it anyway, what could possibly go wrong?!?!"

How about implementing a ticket system (or hiring a crew with the proper scanners) similar to concerts and sporting events? Do either of those scenes experience counterfeiting issues?

 

[dc55110]

How about implementing a ticket system (or hiring a crew with the proper scanners) similar to concerts and sporting events? Do either of those scenes experience counterfeiting issues?

People counterfeit tickets for every event there is, it is all in how the event organizers have planned to authenticate the tickets being presented. At this point they are just trying to save some face with their customers, but it would have really showed some integrity if they had come right out and said...
"We really messed this up. We didn't properly vet our ticket verification system and as a result there was a complete breakdown at the gates. More people were let into the event that we had planned for and the situation quickly got out of our control. We regret not having been properly prepared for an event of this scale. We feel the only way to rectify this with our customers is to offer a full refund to all legitimate ticket holders. We understand that a sizable number of fraudulent tickets we sold in the secondary market, but we cannot guarantee any tickets that were not purchased directly through CCB or our ticketing company."

If they make a press release like this Saturday evening/Sunday morning, it would have pretty much been the end of it.

 

[JulianB1]

People on other channels are trying to compare this to stories about forging Super Bowl tickets and the like. What they don't seem to realize is in those cases it's usually actual forging, not photocopying.

 

[sacrelicio]

People on other channels are trying to compare this to stories about forging Super Bowl tickets and the like. What they don't seem to realize is in those cases it's usually actual forging, not photocopying.

And that's a huge, world famous event. Not even comparable.

 

[HeadHunter]

How about implementing a ticket system (or hiring a crew with the proper scanners) similar to concerts and sporting events? Do either of those scenes experience counterfeiting issues?

Didnt they use Eventbrite, who does ticketing for concerts and sporting events? Although it sounded like they didnt have the option to disable the ticket once it was verified. Neither did it sound like they have enough people scanning tickets.

The big local beer fest here (Steel City Big Pour) uses ShowClix (eventbrite competitor) and enough scanners to admit 1500 people (per session) in about 20 minutes. Although to be fair, ShowClix had issues the first couple of years they handled the tickets with demand on the website when tickets went on sale.

 

[sacrelicio]

Everything about them seems like they are trying to please everyone and are scatterbrained. Even the sheer number of beers that they package and release points to this.

"Let's have a huge event, where we release Hunah, every variant imaginable, and other limited beers, plus we'll do some 5 year anniversary beers, have some of the hottest breweries in the US come down and tap their most sought after beers! And we'll be nice: let people buy cases at the end, and transfer tickets, wheel coolers around, bring chairs, and everything! It'll be so cool!"

 

[Treebs]

Everything about them seems like they are trying to please everyone and are scatterbrained. Even the sheer number of beers that they package and release points to this.

"Let's have a huge event, where we release Hunah, every variant imaginable, and other limited beers, plus we'll do some 5 year anniversary beers, have some of the hottest breweries in the US come down and tap their most sought after beers! And we'll be nice: let people buy cases at the end, and transfer tickets, wheel coolers around, bring chairs, and everything! It'll be so cool!"

Three Floyds does all of that and there really aren't any major problems, the only caveat being no coolers on the festival grounds. Once they implemented that rule the results were immediately noticeable.

Edit: I'm also not saying that FFF hasn't had and won't have its share of problems going forward, but DLD also has 6,000 that line up starting at 4 AM day of.

 

[dc55110]

People on other channels are trying to compare this to stories about forging Super Bowl tickets and the like. What they don't seem to realize is in those cases it's usually actual forging, not photocopying.

I was part of that conversation, while I didn't bring up the Super Bowl, I did compare it to using some of the official secondary market ticket exchanges. All of these allow you to print you ticket at home. You can make as many copies as you like, but as soon as the first is scanned all the others are instantly worthless.
As far as I'm aware that Eventbrite tickets each have a unique barcode. This should allow them to be able to validate a single use of that barcode.

 

[JulianB1]

I was part of that conversation, while I didn't bring up the Super Bowl, I did compare it to using some of the official secondary market ticket exchanges. All of these allow you to print you ticket at home. You can make as many copies as you like, but as soon as the first is scanned all the others are instantly worthless.
As far as I'm aware that Eventbrite tickets each have a unique barcode. This should allow them to be able to validate a single use of that barcode.

Yeah, wasn't trying to infer that what you were saying was at all incorrect. It was directed at the suggestions that this is the doing of some professional ticket forging ring or something like that along the same lines as those that have attempted forgeries of SB tickets and so on.

 

[tehzachatak]

This is not difficult to understand. Had CCB scanned the tickets and actually turned away anyone with a duplicate, it would have been fine. They didn't. The end. Thousands of large events use this exact same system every year.

There's no such thing as real vs. fake. There's multiple copies of the same ticket- and if you use it like you're supposed to, the first scan gets in, the rest don't. Sucks for all the people with duplicates, but that is what it is. I don't understand their comment about "trying to figure out real vs. fake".

 

[dc55110]

The easiest way to solve the problems these events experience is to first have the event planned out months in advance, review what has worked and not worked at your previous events, look into how other similar events have worked and staff with more people that you think you'll need.

Oh, and make it a free event, in late fall, in Minnesota...

 

[user 305169]

Here is another response from him:

"i have no doubt we could've done something better, but the scanning system was a joke and sorting out the real from the fake would have been even more incredibly time-consuming and would have screwed even more people from getting in. i don't want to imagine the hoard at the gates had we prevented everyone from getting in."

Well if the system was a joke how do you go into it relying on it? "Hey these don't work! There is no way we will be able to scan all the tickets... Let's roll with it anyway, what could possibly go wrong?!?!"

Leaked screenshot of the QR-scanning app used by CCB:

 

[daniel1]

Does anyone know if they used WiFi or cellular to scan the tickets? I can make a pretty educated guess but was curious if anyone knows definitively. How about setting up a secure, non-broadcast wireless network and use that to scan the tickets instead of using the cellular network getting ass ****** from every direction by every person using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Untappd? I have a hard time believing the blame is on Eventbrite's side here.

Look at the comments from CCB here. Blaming the ticket scanning and attendees instead of themselves. Calling people ********. Unable to clearly communicate a simple definition of the word "early". With these people at the helm, this thing was ****** since Jump Street