Seasonal Creep

This is one of those weird times of year in the beer world. Not many breweries make "spring seasonals", and those that do offer them seem to do it as an afterthought. This is evidenced by the fact that many of them only see about 1-2 months of shelf time before they get replaced with summer seasonals. For the chain stores it's an easy solution; they simply wait until one is gone before they bring in the new one. We don't have that luxury because people expect us to have new stuff right away, but they also expect us to carry the good seasonal offerings (like Celebration) long after they're out of season.

We've rearranged the store countless times in the two years we've been in the new location, and in that time we've devised a layout that allows us to carry roughly 1100-1200 beers. Generally there's an equal number of things going out of season (or limited stuff that simply sells out) as there are new things coming in, so it becomes a simple matter of "replace X with Y in the cooler", but when you're faced overlapping seasonals it presents a problem. The solution? Close outs. We currently have an entire rack filled with perfectly drinkable winter seasonals that got evicted from their homes by incoming spring/summer beers. If you're looking for one last 6pk of something like Laughing Dog Cold Nose then our loss is your gain.

Where am I going with this? I really don't know. I guess it's just something I've been pondering all day because we received a bunch of "summer seasonals" in the middle of March. That leads me to today's list of new arrivals...

New American Craft Beers:

• Blue Moon - Honey Moon
• Southern Oregon Brewing - Woodshed Red
• Alaskan Brewing - Summer Ale
• Capital Brewing - Blonde Doppelbock (Hooray, more Wisconsin beer!)
• Lagunitas GnarlyWine
• Deschutes Cinder Cone
• Lagunitas Maximus (now in 12oz bottles and 6pks)
  
• Cascade Lakes Blonde Bombshell

New Imports:

• Monk's Cafe Flemish Sour
• Wittekerke (returning after a lapse in distribution)
• Ename Tripel
• Kapittel Sampler 4 Pack

New Sake:

• Kikusui Junmai Ginjo - The world's first certified organic sake!

That should do it, have a great weekend!