[UPDATED with actual thread link.] Some spare bottles of Double Dry Hopped Stone Ruination IPA with Citra & Centennial Hops recently made their way to the Stone Store. Some Beer Advocate members voiced displeasure with their purchases upon discovery that the IPA had been bottled in late June. This led to the following post (Corrected Link / see bottle pic here) from Stone Brewing‘s Communications Specialist, Jacob McKean:
To get right to the point: we should’ve handled this differently. If you’d like a refund for your bottle of Double Dry Hopped Stone Ruination IPA with Citra & Centennial Hops, come back to the Stone Company Store (with either your bottle, empty or full, or the credit card you used to purchase the bottle), and we’ll give you a full refund.
To answer the OP, the first bottling run for this beer was 6/22/11, which was a test of our new 500ml packaging equipment. The beer was intended to be given away to Team Stone members only (as the back label makes clear.) We ended up with several hundred extra bottles though, and we figured we’d quietly give a few lucky fans the chance to buy it.
We screwed up by not communicating exactly what people were getting with their $10 though. The beer was recently tasted & approved by a panel of our brewers, and frankly, we think it tastes great. So if you bought one, we believe you’ll still be pretty happy with what’s in the bottle, but if you’d like to bring it back, no problem.
Again, apologies to anyone who feels that they were misled about this beer. We thought it would be a fun surprise for those lucky enough to be walking through our store this weekend, but obviously that’s not how it worked out. We’ll do better next time. Oh, and shorter lines at Zwanze Day too.
good beer is good beer. I’d have jumped on this in a NY minute if I found it in my beer store. some people are just snobs and whiners.
Amen, man.
I’m sure it’s good, but I can really tell when Ruination has a few months of age on it. Fresh Ruination is a magical beer.
Old beer or not, I see that Stone is continuing the trend started with the barrel program…charging markedly more money for less beer than they ever have before. $10 for 500 ml, when you can get 22 oz. of Russian Imperial or Barleywine for $5.50-$6. Getting greedy or what? C’mon man!