Here's what Dan had to say, roughly (because I couldn't keep up -- he was a little excited -- but this is not a quote, it's a paraphrase, and if it's not right, I hope Dan will give me another call!).
It's a matter of demand and capacity. Weyerbacher's Imperial Pumpkin Ale, for example: to meet wholesaler pre-orders, they have to start brewing it in May and continue through to September to have enough for it to be available through the whole season. They don't have room to store it until September, so they start shipping it out in late June...and well, the wholesalers don't have unlimited room either [and I assume no one really wants to have fresh beer just sitting around; I don't] so they start releasing it.The same thing happens with Autumnfest. Most wholesalers in far off states only want to deal with one shipment of a seasonal. So they can ship it in late July, or they can ship it in mid-September. But the wholesalers tell them: if they get Autumnfest in mid-September, the shelves are already full of other Oktoberfest beers, and theirs won't sell."It’s not necessarily the way we want to do it, but if people want these seasonal beers, that’s how we have to do it." [and that is a quote.]
I remember this is why Harpoon used to do contract brewing of their seasonals at Matt's in Utica; it was a huge bulge in their brewing schedule, and that let them get through that. Popular seasonals can be a real production issue.
So that leaves the brewer with some unappealing choices. They can make less of a beer that their fans really want -- and lose those sales, and really piss off the people who don't get as much as they want -- or they can make the beers as best they can, and put up with the minor embarrassment of selling pumpkin beers in July (and moderately pissing off beer traditionalists).
Responses? One that comes to mind is that beers like Hopslam and Nugget Nectar seem to do okay on limited releases (and large prices). Another is that maybe bitching about seasonals being two months early is kind of like being terribly upset about the kind of glass you drink out of...
But another one comes from thinking about what I said about Harpoon, and something else Dan said in our first conversation. He said, "I think we'll see at least two more years of this kind of growth [in the craft beer category]. But brewers can’t do much more with what they have now [in terms of brewing capacity]. They’ll have
to expand, and that takes time, and money." And Harpoon? Well, they don't have to get their seasonals done at Matt's anymore. They're big enough that they take those seasonal bulges in stride now. With size comes smoothing. Weyerbacher's headed that way, but they've got a bit to go...
Meanwhile, they could do what Victory does. At Victory, seasonals come when the brewing schedule allows them. They let the yeast and the drinkers tell them what's coming out when. Of course, it helps that they do Festbier year-round...and they don't do a pumpkin beer -- I strongly doubt that they ever will.
I hear the bell for round two...
