The Booze and Waffle Thread, Long Live The Wild Wild West (Read 401 times)

Yes, the whole stand in line Black Friday release thing is gonna be interesting this year in the age of Covid. I’ll be curious to see how the liquor stores handle this.

Not booze-specific (though they do sell alcohol), but my son works for a large grocery/big box retailer that will be closed on Thanksgiving for the first time ever; in large part a response to Covid. I hope this becomes a thing.

That's so funny - I was just thinking about you yesterday, because I made a work-recovery-drink involving Luxardo Maraschino.** Hope all is well!

**Fill a pint glass with ice, then almost-full of orange soda, then add a big splash of lemon juice, 1 T green Chartreuse and a dash of Maraschino.

Code red...code red...there's a shortage of aluminum cans for beer due to the shift in production from kegs to cans for retail. Many microbreweries have shifted production away from bottles and can only can -- at least in here in northern New England. Gulp.

This is nationwide and the biggest biff is initially happening at Miller-Coors.

What is dumb about this is that, in retrospect, this was suuuuuper easy to predict back in March, but it's like it did not occur to those responsible for buying materials (nor those making cans). They will eventually catch up.

Also many, if not most, craft breweries have been all-cans or in the process of converting to mostly cans (bombers being a notable exception) over the past year or two. And I can tell you that in the macro world (think Bud, etc etc etc) cans outsell bottles by a lot. The one style where the opposite is true - Mexican beers. That's still dominated by bottles. 

Wondering about German beers... lots of bottles there still, but a surprising number of cans. And product lines where we've started carrying cans vs bottles (Paulaner and Hacker Pschorr are two good examples), the cans immediately outsell the bottles.

Fun exception - still a lot of bottling for Oktoberfest. Craft breweries that can stuff put their OF beers in cans, but all the rest are still bottles.

I can see heuristically at least a small part of how this could happen. I've without really thinking about it purchased only cans rather than my usual bottles since the pandemic started. Probably because I know I'm going to drink a lot of that beer outdoors, picnicking with my take-out.

And it's shower beer season (and beers on boats season). Bottles in the shower is never a good plan.

Not to be confused with bathtub gin.

 

Ha!

Apropos of nothing, you all might want to visit here if you're ever in Vienna, AT.

About a block from that place is a pub called "Centimeter".  You order pizza type things by the Centimeter.  They also have a meter long beer to order in a funny glass.  The food is very good -- not sure about the beer.

Though for my money, I'll eat Käsekrainer all day long (and often did).