Our Kate The Great Adventure

If you know anything about beer, you know that Kate The Great (Portsmouth Brewery’s Imperial Stout) is the most sought after beer in the US. It is only released a few times a year, and in very limited quantities. This year only 900 bottles were released People come from across the country, and sometimes outside the country to get a bottle of this beer.

This is my story/adventure of how I got 2 out of the 900 this year.

The Sunday afternoon before Kate The Great day, we were on our way home from Maine – where we had visited Sunday River, my in-laws, and Ebenezer’s Pub, to meet up with our friends Chris, Bridget and their 2.5 month old Finnegan. We had decided a few weeks before that, that we wanted to try and go for Kate The Great, and as our house is only 25 minutes to Portland, they decided to crash at our house the night before.

Sunday afternoon we checked out the Portsmouth Brewery web site to find information about release times for calendar pages (their form or lottery). The website said something along the lines of “the official time we will be giving out calendar days is 7:00AM, however we may release some earlier than that”. We also saw on Beer Advocate that at least 238 people had said that they were going to Kate The Great day.

So when Chris, Bridget and Finn arrived we talked about what time to get up. Originally we were thinking of leaving the house at 5:00 AM, but after our research we knew we had to head out earlier. I called my good friends Carolyn and Chris – who also wanted to join us Kate The Great 2010 and who happen to live a few blocks away from the brewery – and suggested an earlier start. We decided to leave at 4:15 AM.

So on Monday 3/1/10 Steve (my hubby), myself, Chris, Bridget, and our little trooper Finnegan headed out of the house to stand in line in the freezing cold/rain. We all had to gear up for the cold weather, so some of us (not Bridget – she managed to look super cute – darn her ;) ) looked a little silly, but we were going to stay warm. When we drove by at 4:55 AM we saw that there was a small group of people and that they were already handing out tickets. We parked in the nearest parking space and got our calendar dates. We had December - so that means at least 250-300 people had already been there before 5:00 AM. We decided to find a coffee shop and wait for my friends Carolyn and Chris. They arrived at 5:15 and stood in line behind about 75 people, and barley made the cut off for a calendar day. By 5:25 all the guaranteed dates were gone.

We all then headed back to their house, changed, as the rain had died down a bit, had some coffee, and took off at 7:00 AM to get breakfast at a local place downtown. When we walked in at 7:10 there were many happy, but also many sad faces in the packed restaurant. You could tell who got calendar days and who did not.

So we ordered and ate breakfast, and paid our check around 8:45. Kate The Great was being released for sale at 9: 00 so we had to be back at the brewery by 9:00. As we were walking towards the brewery we saw a huge line of a few hundred people for people who missed the bottles, but wanted to try it on tap. They were tapping a few kegs at 11:30 AM. We got there in the perfect time, waited until our month was called (about 9:30ish) and got our 2 bottles each.