Green Flash is one of those breweries that the geeks among us long to have access to but so far those hopes and dreams have been left unfullfilled. A couple weeks back it looked like that might all change when I got an email from one of our distributors in Northern Idaho that he was going to be getting in Green Flash and that it'd be available for us to order within a matter of days. I of course said great, send me a few cases of each. Well there's this pesky little thing called the Idaho Alcohol Control Board and as it happens neither the brewer or the distributor had registered the beer with the state.
Here's a little break down of how the whole thing went down.
Our distributor sees that another distributor they have a relationship with recently brought in Green Flash. These two distributors regularly buy product from one another for sale in markets where the other one doesn't have operations so my distributor has a few cases of several Green Flash beers transferred to their warehouse in Northern Idaho.
Because the brewers typically register their beer with the states that they sell in the distributor never checked to see if the product was registered. To be fair, the state of Idaho does not have a good system to check for registered breweries to begin with so even if they had tried to check, chances are they wouldn't have gotten the info anyway. Also, because the relationship with the brewery is with a different distributor, not the one that sold the beer in Idaho there was no line of communication to know whether the beer had been registered for sale in Idaho.
So anyway, we ordered the beer and it showed up on the truck and we put it on the shelves. A couple days later the brewers rep for Firestone Walker (a brewery also entering the Idaho market in April) came into the store here and saw the bottles on the shelf. He thought to himself, "I didn't know Green Flash was in Idaho", so he called the brewer. The brewer was obviously perplexed by the fact that his beer was showing up on shelves in states where he did not have a distribution agreement so he set about tracking down exactly how the beer showed up here. Ultimately he asked that all the beer that was shipped to Idaho be removed from store shelves and so we complied.
Well its been a bit of a ramble but thats the story of Green Flash's brief stint in Boise. There's a good chance that we'll see Green Flash on the shelves officially in the coming months so don't despair. This little snafu was certainly unfortunate but its just a bump in the road towards bigger and better beers to come.
