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Originally Posted by TheDefiniteArticle
I just can't imagine waiting an hour for a beer. I feel it must be the case that most of the wait is a 'hype factor' issue. With that said, I've never had Trillium or Treehouse, and the Trillium event at Beavertown a couple of weeks ago apparently had hour-long queues in the UK as well. The breweries need to expand production and employ more customer service people, surely?
Sometimes demand is just far too great for supply to fulfill in the short term. Also, when you get the very best quality beer, sometimes the owner is more of an artist or creative type than a business person. Sometimes they are a fine business person but they are just very protective of the quality of their product so they dot every i and cross every t several times before they even consider expanding.
Restaurants have long waits though all the time, even some established for years. Beer is a little more straightforward, but there is a marketing angle to having people wait in line 1-6 hours for beers like Dark Lord once a year, so many non beer people would bring up Three Floyd's to me when I lived in Chicago after finding out I was a homebrewer. "That brewery where people wait in like 6 hours for a beer, that must be one hell of a beer!."
Personally though, it now has to be one of my favorite beers. Medianoche is the only thing I'm aware of that I'll wait an hour in line for and they are probably going to tickets for the fall release anyways, so I won't have to wait in a massive line.
I'd wait an hour for enough Treehouse or Trillium too, but would need to get an 8 pack I think minimum.
There are a few hundred guys out by me, a vocal minority of beer drinkers that mostly chase rare beers. They like the lines, because they are willing to sit in them and it means the value of their beer in national trades is going to be pretty high. So they will drink some of the beer they get in these lines and trade the rest for other line waiting type beers elseware in the country. It's an interesting dynamic, but having been to a number of tastings with these "ultra rare" beers, I think going the festival route is a much better way to access the "whales" without being frequently disappointed (rare beers and big beers are two fests with # of these "whale beers" from jester king, black project, side project, casey, weldwerks, kane, three floyd's and more). These are mostly sours and barrel aged beers, IPA lines are a thing but those don't usually trade for nearly the $oz that some of these sours and ba beers trade for.