Goose Island Bourbon County Stout: Rare Beer Hunting

This year’s Black Friday sales numbers saw a bit of a dip from last year, but one area where Black Friday sales were through the roof was in the hunt for the highly desirable Goose Island bourbon barrel aged series of “Bourbon County Stout” beers. It has become an annual tradition with the large Chicago brewer (owned by the gigantic company AB Inbev) to release a variety of limited and allocated Bourbon County Stout beers and variables on Black Friday. This includes the base beer, as well as a Bourbon County Coffee Stout, a “variant” (which means the base with different barrel treatments and variations on ingredients added to it), and their “Proprietor’s Bourbon County Stout,” which only sees limited releases in Chicago. This year Goose Island also released the beer that all the enthusiastic beer fans were eager to hunt down, “Bourbon County Rare.” Rare is a feat in beer making, but also one of marketing.

Packaged in a 16.9 ounce bottle, at 14.5 percent alcohol, this beer has been aged for two years in 35-year-old Heaven Hill bourbon barrels. The combination of old barrels, plus an extended period of aging adds to the appeal of this beer. The marketing comes from the combination of the beer being more limited, and fitting labeled “Rare” to increase this perception, along with its presentation, sold in a wooden box to make the beer look more prestigious and valuable. Here’s the catch, the bottle sells for anywhere from $60-$75 a bottle. That’s right, that’s more than $3.50 an ounce for this beer. If you’d think this would lead to bottles collecting dust on the shelf, you don’t know the fanaticism of the craft beer community. Not only did these bottles sell out instantly, but they command long lines. The Black Friday event which sold the most Rare bottles in New York City sold 150 bottles on Black Friday at 9am. Each person was allowed the right to purchase one bottle, and the line formed early in the craze to secure bottles of rare. The 150 person cut-off happened around 3:30am, some 5 1/2 hours before the beers eventual release.

Each year more people join the craze to hunt after rare and sought after beers. Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout lineup is just one example of many highly sought after and limited beers at this point, though it is the beer with the most national attention and media surrounding its allocated release. While it seems like the craze over these beers should hit a saturation point at some point, the hype and hunt for bottles of Goose Island Rare this year seem to indicate that we’re a long way from that happening.