Magic Hat is a local South Burlington, Vermont brewery. Below is the cover of their new 12-pack variety brew, Night of the Living Dead, telling us that Halloween is right around the corner.
Notice the Mystery Beer? I love the concept and Magic Hat's approach to new varieties in their line of beers. First, they name the beers "Batch 1", "Batch 2", etc. The current batch number is 371. I like the simple naming convention.
Secondly, they serve up the new batches at their brewery's taste bar, where I often go to have my Magic Hat half-gallon jug topped off. I'm sure that the popularity of new batches at the home-base bar provides Magic Hat with some good numbers on a brew's popularity and how folks outside of the immediate area might like it.
But the most interesting aspect of Mystery Beer and the Hat's approach on deciding what new beers to develop is the "Rave or Grave" designation on the bottleneck labels. (shown below) A URL is listed on the label where you can help decide on the beer's future. http://mysterybeer.magichat.net/mysterybeer/
All is not perfect in Magic Hat Valley, however, as the URL takes you to a form to vote on Batch 370, NOT Batch 371. Maybe its my age (40's), but I think their entire graphic-heavy site was ill-conceived from the start. Give me simple navigation and interesting content about your beers and your company, Magic Hat. I don't want to mouse-over dripping faucet pipes and see what happens! That's just my opinion on the website design, but when you put together a coordinated market research program and the final URL in the chain is wrong, then someone needs bitch-slapped aplenty.
So much for the love I felt starting this post. Maybe after I polish off a few bottles of Blind Faith I'll get it back.
