Yesterday was one of those days that I hope to look back on and learn from.
Double Nugget was a super-fun beer to come up with and work on, and I’m loving how it turned out.
The release, on the other hand, didn’t go well.
The only way that Chris and I and our 200+ co-workers get to do what we love is if you are along for the ride. We all know that, and it’s the lens through which we make decisions. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes, unfortunately, they’re wrong.
As tough as it is to hear when we’ve let customers down, we’re glad for all of the feedback you’ve sent. And there are lots of questions. I’ll try to answer the most common ones down below.
Thank you. — John Trogner
Why did you edit your social media announcement of the Double Nugget presale date?
We had a miscommunication here at Tröegs and definitely messed that up. We tried to fix our mistake as quickly as possible.
Why didn’t you brew more or have a limit on sales?
I’ll take the blame for the batch size and the lack of a limit. We’ve been releasing beer for more than 20 years, and none of them prepared us for the demand for Double Nugget. Especially the dozen or so we’ve released during the pandemic.
When we were planning this beer, indoor seating was not allowed, and traffic to our Tasting Room was down more than 70%.
Since our Scratch Series launched in 2007, a typical draft batch is about 15 barrels. For a canned Scratch release, we tend to do 30 barrels. Balancing the love people have for Nugget and the market conditions, we brewed 45 barrels of Double Nugget.
In all honesty, we thought the beer would last a week or two, and we didn’t think we’d need a limit.
We were wrong.
We know that scarcity, hype and super-limited releases are part of today’s craft beer landscape. But that’s not our thing. Our goal is to make enough beer that it isn’t stressful to get, but not so much that it gets old. We don’t want lines here, and we don’t want people to walk away disappointed.
For what it’s worth, the average Double Nugget transaction was for two 4-packs.
Why wasn’t I able to buy beer that was in my online shopping cart?
The limited amount of beer available online sold so fast that our system was pulling inventory as customers completed their purchase, rather than when the item was added to your cart. This led to the beer disappearing from your cart during checkout.
No doubt that was frustrating, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Another thing to work on for next time.
Why did you even sell Double Nugget online?
For the same reason we launched Tröegs To-Go last March – safety. We wanted to offer a way for people to buy our beer through contactless curbside pickup.
Will we ever see Double Nugget again?
For sure. We’re planning to brew it again next year, and we’d love to get it to our retail partners. We owe them, our wholesalers and our street teams an apology, too. We should have made enough to send out into the world so all of those calls from customers could have been answered with filled orders rather than a “Sorry, not available.”
We missed the mark on customer service for this release, and we’ll do our best not to repeat those mistakes. The entire team here tries to account for every detail possible to help make “taste memories” that last. I thank them for working so hard to do just that.
Thanks for hearing us out. And to all those customers who did get to try Double Nugget, we hope you loved it.
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