The Bar Towel

"And here is the list of all the locations around the world that will welcome the Zwanze Day on Saturday 19/09/2015 :

CANADA
- Dieu du Ciel -- Montréal, Québec
- barVolo -- Toronto, Ontario
- Biercraft – Vancouver, British Columbia"

Anyone know when tickets are going on sale?

Last year IIRC the Volo guys kept it pretty close to the chest and didn't announce anything (incl. tickets) until September. I'd expect the same this year.

Move along.....nothing to see here.

....and (practically canada) blue monk in buffalo too!

Sold out within minutes last year IIRC.

Minutes is waaaay longer than tickets lasted. I had multiple people sitting there just hitting refresh and didn't manage to get a ticket.

But then I waited in line and got in when ticketed people were leaving. I just missed out on the Zwanze, but I did get to have like 5 different Cantillon's that night, so it was pretty incredible anyway.

Craig wrote:Minutes is waaaay longer than tickets lasted. I had multiple people sitting there just hitting refresh and didn't manage to get a ticket.

But then I waited in line and got in when ticketed people were leaving. I just missed out on the Zwanze, but I did get to have like 5 different Cantillon's that night, so it was pretty incredible anyway.

I remember one of the Volo guys tweeted that they sold out in 20 seconds.
The beer gods were shining brightly on me that day, but I don't expect lightning to strike twice so I'm perfectly fine lining up for the leftovers this year

Cass wrote:Last year IIRC the Volo guys kept it pretty close to the chest and didn't announce anything (incl. tickets) until September. I'd expect the same this year.

It appears they are indeed keeping a tight lid on it again. I don't know what the logic is for this. If they'd announce it sooner then people could plan their weekend based on getting tickets/not getting them.

New information I heard over the weekend is that the GLB takeover and Jester King are tests for not doing a ticketed event.

Makes me a bit nervous. Wasn't it because of the huge line to get into a Beau's takeover that they started doing tickets?

However....in my experience, tickets or not, there is always lots of beer left when they opened to non-ticket holders at 9pm.

one of the tweets on the Volo account says they'll be releasing more info tomorrow (Thursday)

More information is indeed out:
http://www.barvolo.com/blog/zwanze
To summarize:
You can buy a tasting ticket for $25 which includes one 4-oz pour of the Zwanze beer and a glass ($15). Tickets will not get you any sort of priority admission. It's just going to be a line with one-in, one-out. They will attempt to make sure that anyone with a ticket gets in to taste it between 3 and 10 PM.

Some thoughts: The Zwanze beer has never been my favorite beer of the event...in fact, I have a hard time committing to $25 just to taste one beer. This takes a lot of the pressure off with getting tickets. But, ugh, lines. It's going to be bad, and this is the kind of event where people linger. So, should be an interesting experiment.

The participating brewers list has some interesting names on it too:

Cantillon (Brussels, Belgium)
Oude Beersel (Beersel, Belgium)
Del Ducato (Parma, Italy)
Jester King (Austin,TX)
Jolly Pumpkin (Dexter,MI)
Leelanu (Dexter,MI)
Stillwater Artisanal (Maryland,US)
Trois Dames (Switzerland)
Freigeist (Köln, Germany)
De Ranke (Belgium)

(plus a bunch of Canadian stuff)

Should be awesome, as always.

I assume the "participating brewers" refers, for the most part, to bottles that will be available, since that (non-Canadian) lineup is a replica of breweries of which they currently offer bottles. The Canadian ones, of course, will likely have draft options. Just an assumption.
Ren

napoleon wrote:More information is indeed out:
http://www.barvolo.com/blog/zwanze
To summarize:
You can buy a tasting ticket for $25 which includes one 4-oz pour of the Zwanze beer and a glass ($15). Tickets will not get you any sort of priority admission. It's just going to be a line with one-in, one-out. They will attempt to make sure that anyone with a ticket gets in to taste it between 3 and 10 PM.

Some thoughts: The Zwanze beer has never been my favorite beer of the event...in fact, I have a hard time committing to $25 just to taste one beer. This takes a lot of the pressure off with getting tickets. But, ugh, lines. It's going to be bad, and this is the kind of event where people linger. So, should be an interesting experiment.

I like this. I agree, the zwanze's that I have had were not my favorites of the night either. As much as I like the glass, I have no room for any more volofunk® glasses so this is a bit of a no-brainer for me.
Like I said earlier, I remember much of the crowd leaving by 9 in previous years.