All this was basically an accident. An Idaho distributor tells a store (specifically Brewforia) that Green Flash will be available in Idaho in the coming weeks. The store orders Green Flash. ( I mean come on, who wouldn’t.) Beer hits shelves.
Woah, woah, woah. Wait. Is Green Flash approved for Idaho? Nope. You were mistaken. How the hell did you get this beer?
It breaks down like this. (It’s a little he said, she said, but not in a bad way.)
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.
With Green Flash’s East Coast manifest destiny ( Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida) there is a high likely hood that the beer will be available in the state this year. Just not now. Sorry Idaho. [Facebook]
