Everything is going according to plan

Here is a sampling of the new comic book panel style mural that we commissioned for the Pub hallway.  If you are interested in commissioning a mural from these guys send an e-mail to chitownmurals@gmail.com

The artwork should look a touch familiar as it was done by the same artists who gave us this.

For the second World Beer Cup in a row we have won Gold for Behemoth in the Imperial Red Category

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/food/2142342,CST-NWS-darklord06.article#

Special beer sold only one day a year

DARK LORD | Brewed in Indiana, premium stout draws beer lovers from around the world lucky enough to score a Golden Ticket

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April 6, 2010

BY MARK J. KONKOL Staff Reporter / mkonkol@suntimes.com

Forget whatever you might have heard about Belgian monks cornering the market on thick, tasty brews.

These days, beer nirvana is in a Munster, Ind., industrial park where a band of metal heads crafts what some experts say is some of the finest beer in the world.

If you want a taste of Three Floyds Brewing Co.’s finest flavor — a thick, potent molasses-sweet stout — your odds are never good. A bottle of Dark Lord — a Russian-style imperial stout — is available just once a year, on “Dark Lord Day,” April 24.

You have to show up at the brewery to get it. And before you’re allowed to pony up 15 bucks per 22-ounce bottle, you have to score a “Golden Ticket” online that guarantees your chance to buy it.

“This is not a beer you drink after weeding your garden,” brewer Barnaby Struve says. “This is something that is very special and very strong and should be treated like an after-dinner sort of thing. Something to share with friends and family on special occasions.”

Dark Lord was first brewed in 2004. It’s Three Floyds founder Nick Floyd’s response to a local brewer’s boasting about his own stout. The beer is brewed with hundreds of pounds of Intelligentsia Black Cat espresso, Mexican vanilla and Indian dessert sugar that mingle to create an intense stout with a viscosity akin to that of, say, Quaker State motor oil. Dark Lord was rated in the 100th percentile — that’s the best — of beers by Ratebeer.com, which also named Three Floyds the best brewery in the world for 2010.

This year’s Dark Lord is the biggest “most brutal” vintage ever, with 15 percent alcohol content and 700 calories a bottle, head brewmaster Chris Boggess says.

Intrigued? Thirsty? Ready to Google yourself a Golden Ticket?

Well, maybe next year. This year’s batch of Golden Tickets sold out in less than an hour after Three Floyds announced their release on Twitter. In fact, so many people swarmed the Web site that offered the tickets that the servers crashed, creating a blog-post backlash from out-of-luck beer aficionados.

Sometimes, though, if you’re lucky, you can find drinkers willing to share a taste, sell a bottle or even hawk an extra Golden Ticket on Dark Lord Day, a free, daylong festival that drew nearly 7,000 people to Three Floyds’ industrial park last year.

But you’d better get there early and be patient, says Struve. By the time the brewery doors open at 10 a.m., usually you’ll find thousands of people already packing the parking lot, where they can sample craft beers from across the country while rock bands play.

“We’re lucky people in Munster allow us to do it,” Struve says. “You don’t need a ticket to come. You can bring your own beer to trade with friends.”

People come from all over the country. Some North Side bars — including Quenchers on Fullerton — have organized bus trips to Dark Lord Day.

“It’s organized chaos,” Struve says. “We have about 12 cops around with their Tasers all warmed up and waiting. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”

Photo Gallery

The Pub will be closed to the public on Friday, April 9th for a private industry event.

We wanted to give some context to Golden Ticket sales now that we have gotten a chance to look at the numbers from the other night.  First, we want to say thank you to everyone.  If the sheer volume of traffic that we received is an indicator of the popularity of Dark Lord Day, this year will be better than any other, and we are doing our best to make sure that we can meet expectations.  After reading through the beer forums, it seems that most of you understand that it’s very difficult for us to anticipate demand for our limited number of Golden Tickets, and that we are making a good faith effort to fix any problems that have arisen.  We tried a number of different things this year to try to make the process as painless and smooth for everyone involved.  As Lincoln said on Beer Advocate,

Will we learn from our mistakes and work to avoid them next year? Absolutely. Will other mistakes be made along the way? Most likely. As an organization of only 9 people, we appreciate the patience and understanding a lot of people on this site are showing. At the end of the day, We’re just trying to throw a fun party for thousands of people and do it in a way that is the most fair we can manage.

So with that being said, here are some numbers to consider.

• Our store had 50,423 hits by 5,115 visitors in less than one hour effectively crushing Shopify’s servers
• The majority referred through twitter
• darklordday.com had 16,963 unique visitors
• 3floyds.com had 12,542 unique visitors
• #DarkLordDay and “Golden Tickets” were both trending topics on Twitter at the same time.

Pretty big numbers when you take a step back and look at them.  And again, thank you all for your patronage and most of all patience while we sort everything out over the next few days.  The shipping charges that were erroneously added during the melee are being removed.  A whole lot was happening and we were trying to fix the charges on the fly while the site was crashing.

So with all of that in mind, please don’t forget that we are a comparatively tiny brewery trying to plan a kick ass time for a whole bunch of people, and we don’t even know how many people are going to show up.  Even with all of the planning in the world a successful Dark Lord Day still depends on all of you out there making it a great time for everyone else that shows up.  Keep an eye on Darklordday.com for updates and we’ll see you on April 24th.

A cool video showing the most recent artwork addition at the brewery

Yikes!

http://twitter.com/3floyds

Thanks for everyone who purchased golden tickets, that was a wild ride. There where a few hiccups along the way but everything should be sorted out now.

A couple of things to note:

No one will be charged shipping. There was a hiccup in our admin system that caused shipping charges to be added to golden tickets. These charges will not be applied to your credit card. We are removing all shipping charges from your orders.

The site outage was regrettable, but wow, we brought down shopify. We received this email shortly after our services where restored.

Hey guys, Mike from Shopify here.

We’re extremely sorry for the bad showing we gave to your flash-sale of tickets on your Shopify store. I’m afraid you cought us with our pants down with the sheer volume of customers all at once, our datacenter couldn’t handle that many orders a second. We had to disable inventory tracking on all of Shopify temporarily, otherwise we couldn’t keep the system up. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused to you and especially your customers.

Sincerely,

Mike Rochon
Head of Support
Shopify.com

The traffic was amazing. We’ll try and get some actual numbers together for you in the near future. Because of the constant refreshing we’ll be testing for duplicate orders and making sure nobody got charged twice for tickets.

So rest assured we will be burning the midnight oil making sure your tickets get to you hassle free. Until then we’ll be toasting a Three Floyds beer to all you Dark Lord Fanatics.