(San Marcos, CA) – The Lost Abbey announced an upcoming beer release on its website this week. More below…
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Veritas 013 will be put on sale at 11am on April 4th, 2014 at www.lostabbey.com. Bottles are limited to 4 per person and are $40 (+ $1 convenience charge). The pickup window will be broken down to two sessions (early and late) on Saturday, April 19th at The Lost Abbey in San Marcos (155 Mata Way).
By purchasing Veritas from The Lost Abbey, you are agreeing to pick up your purchased bottles during the session that you chose during checkout. If you fail to pick-up your bottles during your chosen session, they will be surrendered back to The Lost Abbey. We are not allowing proxies of any kind for the pickup (We apologize for the inconvenience, but this policy hasn’t changed and was implemented to prevent individual consumers from ending up with more than 4 bottles). Any attempt to have a proxy pick up bottles will result in the bottles being surrendered back to The Lost Abbey (NO EXCEPTIONS).
Veritas 013 – American Sour with Peaches and Nectarines
The 13th edition of the Veritas series is an experiment using 3 separate strains of Brettanomyces, before honey, Peaches and Nectarines were added. The beer spent around 2 years total in French Oak barrels. Notes of fruits Peaches and Nectarines, oaky wood, brown sugar and Toasted Granola with Brett character throughout.
$41/bottle from a brewery known for over charging for beers that are below acceptable standards for premium beers? No thanks
The no proxies policy is crap too. Breweries like Perennial are doing online lotteries for their superior beers and allowing anyone to pick them up for the winners as long as they have a picture of the winner’s ID.
Lost Abbey is still behind the times and trying to constantly increase the prices of beer for no reason other than profit. The production costs of these beer styles did not increase 25-30% over the last 5 years to justify the ridiculous price jumps they implement.
So brave
@Brian
At the end of the day the Lost Abbey isn’t a charity, it’s a for profit business, and businesses are in the business of making money. So they would be doing their bottom line and their investors a disservice if they did not sell their product for a price that the market was willing to pay. Last time I checked the Abbey always sells out of all of their specialty release beers, so maybe they should charge even higher prices. Bottom line, if you don’t like the price, don’t buy the beer.
We can also look at this from a more data driven perspective. If Veritas is aged for 2 years while I assume the Abbey’s typical barrel aged beer is aged for 10-12 months, that would mean that Veritas is in the brewery for twice the length of the average barrel aged beer. Due to this additional time it would seem reasonable that Veritas would cost the brewery more money to produce as the beer takes up valuable tank/barrel/brewery space and requires a paid staff to oversee and take care of the beer. If the average barrel aged 375 ML bottle from the Lost Abbey is about $15 and the 750 ML Veritas 013 is $40, there is only a 33% increase in price for a product that was in the brewery 50% longer than the average barrel aged beer and required more work. This is without taking into consideration that Veritas may contain more costly ingredients than the average beer. Nor does it consider the fact that it is a highly anticipated and coveted limited release beer which adds incalculable additional value to the consumer the beer is targeted to.
Well crafted and cared for boundary bending beer costs money, if you don’t want to pay the price of admission you don’t get to see the show.
lol Cantillon charges less than $15 at their brewery for beers that take them 3 years to make. You know people trade and want your beer. If I can convince a friend to drive from hours away to get me beer, letting him keep one, why not let me? The impact that has is way better than you going against the grain of the brewing industry. If you need to make money, why not do a membership program like many breweries are doing, so that people who don’t live down the street have a chance to try your beer? Also as far as time to produce, if you guys just continued to make the beers, the only added time is at the beginning. There are vineyards that have current releases that are ten years old, because they hold them until they are aged and ready. They don’t have to charge more though because they made that initial investment in their own company to produce and release a product for the consumer that is the best example of their product. Since they continued to produce, they have wine ready every season, just like normal wineries do. I proudly have a DDG, but I’m scared to open it, because I will have to fly from NC to your brewery on release day in three years to ever get a beer like that again. Most east coast people will never get to try it unfortunately. I wish you were as cool as Cascade and shipped!