The LCBO seasonal product call process has been documented numerous times at Free Our Beer - we have been successful with Garrison’s submission into the Autumn 2010 release but unsuccessful with the Winter Warmers release. The basic process was pretty straightforward.  An agent or brewery would submit to the LCBO beers for consideration along with [...]

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Yesterday at the Session beer festival, for the first time at a festival in Ontario we poured Garrison, both the IIPA and Hop Yard Pale Ale.  For many of the patrons there, Garrison was an unfamiliar brewery, and we described the beers to interested drinkers who seemed to quite enjoy both beers. And often we [...]

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The latest private order for Garrison Brewing, many months in the works and not without a few hiccups, finally made it to Ontario at the end of March.  This order was different from the last one as it also featured a couple of licensees getting in on the action, with Bar Volo in Toronto and [...]

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Last year we set up a 2nd private order of Garrison beers to follow on the heels of the successful first one.  We would offer basically everything that Garrison had to offer, and it took a while to get all the orders in.  We had about 2 pallets of beer ordered by customers - the [...]

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With the great news from the LCBO that IIPA was accepted into the fall release, came the great unknown. What was next?  I assumed paperwork, and I was correct.
Shortly after I received acceptance from the LCBO, I was informed of the paperwork that needed to be completed.  There were three primary forms: the “Request for Label Examination”, [...]

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For those that don’t know, the LCBO makes their decisions for what beers come out in stores quite a long time in advance.  It is released publicly what they are looking for - the LCBO calls them “Product Needs” (PDF) and issues to the trade what beers they would like to release basically a year [...]

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OK, it’s been a few months since my last post about the Garrison private order, when I explained the letterhead issue and how that needed to be resolved to keep the process going.  But what happened after that?  As you’ve seen from the recent posts the beer did in fact make it to Ontario and [...]

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It’s been a little while since the last posting but there has certainly been a lot going on.  This week our private order of Garrison beers were released to consumers.  The LCBO has been e-mailing everyone who ordered with instruction that they can now pick up their Garrison at the LCBO warehouse in downtown Toronto [...]

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Here’s a funny story about what I needed to do to ensure that the Garrison private order met with the LCBO’s paperwork policies.
After I submitted the order paperwork, all 104 pages of it, I was contacted by the LCBO’s private ordering department about Garrison’s address.  For background, about three years ago Garrison moved locations in [...]

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The way a private order works conceptually is simple.  There’s a certain number of cases of beer to sell, so consumers are found who are willing to buy the cases until the set number is hit.  In an attempt to simplify how consumers can participate in private orders, I created a web site whereby consumers [...]

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