[3/19 Update: New blog post from Three Floyds Brewing on the matter.]

(Munster, IN) – Internal server errors, trending topics and a major web shopping site brought to its knees . . . all in a day’s work. Some of you lived through it but for posterity, here is what went down.

It was an eventful St. Patrick’s Day for Three Floyds Brewing and those trying to secure Dark Lord golden tickets for the big event in late April. Things didn’t go exactly as planned and the brewery was still sorting the mess into Wednesday night.

How did it all start?

Last year, the brewery put golden tickets on sale around 4:25am in the morning. Some guessed that the brewery would once again put them on sale early in the morning and literally pulled all-nighters so that they wouldn’t miss their chance. Others relied on Twitter’s alerting service to send a text to their phone for when Three Floyds announced the sale.

Over the course of the day, after no announcement had been made, more and more people flocked to DarkLordDay.com, pounding the refresh button for an update on the status of tickets. The site was consequently down for much of the day with a “500 – Internal Server Error.”

On Twitter, the ticket sale was the topic of the day among beer people to the tune of well over 1,000 tweets. The last time that many tweets poured in for a single craft beer topic was back in the fall when users showed their support for Rock Art Brewery in the Monster Energy fiasco. The golden tickets ended up as a trending topic twice in Chicago, an indicator that (at least for a little while) more Chicago people were tweeting about Dark Lord than anything else.

Tickets finally went on sale shortly after 8pm EST/7pm CST but not before some damage had been done. It was St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps the biggest drinking holiday of the year, and at least a few voiced their displeasure with how 3F went about the process. Right before the announcement, the brewery injected some humor into the whole thing (an inside Twitter joke, 3F used its 313th tweet for that message).

I scanned the Twitter Sentiment website at that point which showed a 77%/23% negative/positive split for the term, “3Floyds.”

And that wasn’t even the half of it.

In a move that I actually think was a good idea (because it moved the e-commerce part of off 3F’s own troubled server), the brewery used Shopify.com, a site that lets anyone set up their own e-store, to run the sale. What the folks in Munster didn’t realize was that Shopify was ill-equipped to handle the Dark Lord flood. This is when the St. Paddy’s Day Nightmare really set in. Site errors kept popping up forcing people to keep refreshing the browser. Many folks incurred mysterious shipping charges on the tickets. Confirmation screens didn’t appear. It was a mess.

The Head of Support at Shopify later sent a candid apology to Three Floyds: “You caught us with our pants down.”

Just shy of the 55 minute mark into sales, tickets sold out. Compare this to approximately four hours last year. As far as I know, the number of tickets sold hasn’t yet been disclosed. The Munster team has pledged to sort through all the sales and make sure that no one will have to pay any shipping charges and that is where we currently stand.

Rare beer releases have hit critical mass. It is as if craft beer needs its own Ari Fleischer to consult on these things. That said, it is hard to fault Three Floyds for what happened today. I wouldn’t be surprised if Shopify’s staff were huddled in meetings tomorrow making sure this never happens again and you can’t blame 3F for that part.

As for conducting ticket sales on the night of St. Patrick’s Day . . . I’m guessing that wasn’t plan A and that something happened earlier in the day. Who knows.

This will blow over and all will enjoy the annual pilgrimage to The Prairie Hoosier State come Saturday, April 24th. For those that got left out for tickets, by all accounts, it is still a must-visit event regardless.