Just to confirm, no matter what session (A, B or C), you have access to the festival all day. The specific session is for inside, what specific time you can line up to purchase Dark Lord. This greatly reduced the "standing around in line" time last year, though you will definitely still stand in line to get in and then again to buy Dark Lord, but should be quicker.

It's definitely High On Fire: http://www.3floyds.com/2012/04/26/2012-dld/

They have also announced the variations available (provided you get a winning Golden Ticket):
Bourbon Barrel Aged Dark Lord, Vanilla Bean Bourbon Barrel Aged Dark Lord, Cognac Barrel Aged Dark Lord, and Cognac Barrel Aged Dark Lord de Muerte. $50/bottle. One per person.

They later clarified that "For those of you asking, the Bourbon barrel aged DL this year is a blend of different barrels. The Muerte is made with Ancho and Guajillo chilies."

No word about bottle counts for these variations -- if last year was any indication, I wouldn't expect more than 300-400, depending on the specific variation (and checking now, there were only 165 bottles total of the Three Floyds Dark Lord De Muerte last year -- Good luck!).

How was DLD? If anyone is interested in trading a DLD 12 for and 11 let me know. I was shut out on tickets this year, and would love to try the new version.

danimalarkey wrote:No word about bottle counts for these variations -- if last year was any indication, I wouldn't expect more than 300-400, depending on the specific variation (and checking now, there were only 165 bottles total of the Three Floyds Dark Lord De Muerte last year -- Good luck!).

There were 817 bottles of it this year

Yep, my friend and I both got Muertes. They were down to just barrel aged and Muerte when I got my bottles (about halfway through group C); the BA Vanilla (my first choice) and Cognac BA were both gone. They ran out of Muerte right after we got ours.

We also cracked a bottle this evening, and it's just wonderful. Better than 2011, personally, but I'm curious to hear others' opinions. The rest of my bottles are going into the cellar for a while.

gleam wrote:Yep, my friend and I both got Muertes. They were down to just barrel aged and Muerte when I got my bottles (about halfway through group C); the BA Vanilla (my first choice) and Cognac BA were both gone. They ran out of Muerte right after we got ours.

We also cracked a bottle this evening, and it's just wonderful. Better than 2011, personally, but I'm curious to hear others' opinions. The rest of my bottles are going into the cellar for a while.

The percentage of people who got golden tickets seemed to be much higher this year than last. I'd heard 10% were lucky, but 4 out of 5 in my group and 3 of 4 in the group ahead of us all lucked out. I bought the BA Vanilla (#274 of 934) and the rest of my friends opted for the Muerte and Cognac.

One friend cracked open a bottle of DL '12 while still at the brewery. I hadn't previously tasted a DL so young (and realize we were drinking it a bit warmer than recommended), though it has wonderful potential but was still a bit sweet for me. I'll probably hold off 4-6 months before opening my first.

This was my 2nd DLD and 1st time I'd experienced the whole shebang. (Last year I was Group C and sick, so I went, stood in line, didn't drink, bought my beer & left.) Great fun! I can't even begin to count how many beers we sampled yesterday.

With my napkin math, FFF raked in over a half million dollars in Dark Lord sales alone yesterday*. I know it's hardly free money (the cost of running Dark Lord Day alone must eat into that considerably), but still... Not a dollar lost to distributors, too. And then there were the other bombers and cases sold, too. Yowzahs!

*24,000 bottles Dark Lord @$15 + 3,000 bottles DL variants @$50 = $510,000

I went home with bottle #341 out of 688 bottles of the bourbon barrel aged Dark Lord.

Great to see laikom and turkob there, too. Sorry I missed the other LTHer's.

Nice to see a couple of you briefly yesterday. Sorry I missed the rest.

I did manage to stay upright until High On Fire's set, so that's a big win for me. Also, out of the group of 6 of my friends who were there together, 3 of us had winning tickets. Based on the numbers hand-written on the bottles (934 of the Vanilla, 817 of the Muerte, 688 of the Bourbon, 420 of the Cognac) I'm pretty sure that if they were giving out most or all of the barrel-aged DL variants the winning rate had to have been nearly 50% overall too. (934+817+688+420=2859, out of 6000 tickets sold)

Also I don't think they were handing out the bottle numbers serially. I'm pretty sure I saw people go through later than me with lower bottle numbers. I could be wrong though.

edit: actually, here are my bottle and my friend's bottle, I had the Muerte on the right (337 / 817) and he had the Vanilla on the left (21 / 934):



And here's a guy I interact with on Twitter, I believe he and his friend were ahead of us in line, and their 2 bottles, Muerte on the right (163 / 817), Vanilla on the left (928 / 934):



So I'm pretty sure they were just grabbing bottles randomly.

thegooch wrote:How was DLD? If anyone is interested in trading a DLD 12 for and 11 let me know. I was shut out on tickets this year, and would love to try the new version.

I have plenty of '11, but if you (or anyone else) has a bunch of '10 still, I would trade for that....I only have one '10 left which I'd like to save for a vertical.

Yeah, I had a great time. The line for C was a little bit of a shitshow, which disappointed me only because I heard that the earlier lines (at least A) moved through quite efficiently.

Also, I agree with the above math....about a 1 in 2 shot of 'winning' a special bottle....although our group fell a bit short of that 50% mark, we did have another group of friends in B and all 4 of them hit the variants. It seems they didn't randomize at all. We were fairly close to the front of C and all the vanilla was gone so we opted for cognac. I thought last year they held a third of the allotments of the variants for each group. They definitely did not do it this year.

Can't even imagine how much money FFF raked in on Saturday with that half mil plus merch and beer (both packaged and on tap) sales....

ziggy wrote:

thegooch wrote:It seems they didn't randomize at all.

I have to imagine that they order X scratch-off tickets that read "Yes" and Y that read "No" then shuffle the two piles together. Assuming that's the case--and based on the clumps of yes tickets--someone didn't shuffle very well.