[EPIC] Beer Launch & Eminem VIP Bar

It all started one Friday afternoon, early January 2014, with a brewer and hot sauce maker, tasting hot sauces and tasting beer.

The conversation eventually ended up on “hey I am going to be releasing a hot sauce in February”, I said “I’m going to be brewing a new one off beer for release in kegs only in February”. Why don’t we do a release together. I’ll style my beer so it complements your new hot sauce (which uses the hottest chillies in the world, the Carolina Reaper).

From this point we had a plan which eventuated on Friday with the beer release and hot sauce eating competition.

Epic Carolina + Culley’s Carolina Reaper = Beer & Hot Sauce Launch

Friday 14th February 2014

Finally on tap

Those bright red chillies are the Carolina Reapers. The worlds hottest chilli coming in at over 2 million scoville units.

At the start of the day things were a bit nerve racking at the brewery as the beer was still in the conditioning tank. It still needed to be filtered, kegged and delivered, all before the 5pm kick off. There had been delays in the brewery earlier in the week, which had meant that there wasn’t a tank ready to filter into till Friday morning.

At noon four kegs of the new Epic Carolina Amber Ale 7.2% abv were loaded into the car and swiftly delivered to Brew on Quay, ready for things to kick off at 5pm.

We have a few promotional Culley’s Epic Carolina tshirst for bar staff, and for prizes. Want one?

At 5pm the beer was pouring and there was a chance for everyone to have a taste through the range of hot sauces from Culley’s.

The hot sauce eating competition required the signing of a waiver, and wearing of coveralls and gloves. There were 5 rounds of eating hot wings which became progressively hotter, and the final being the eating of a Carolina Reaper.

More details will follow once I get hold of some of the video footage from the evening. The next Epic Carolina release party is House on Hood on Thursday 20th February.

Eminem concert – Saturday 15 February 2014

Epic was invited to run the backstage VIP bar for concert promoter Paul Dainty at the Rapture 2014 concert at Western Springs on Saturday night.

We stocked the fridge and served the beer (wine, bubbles and food), but mostly beer, which is what people wanted, which was pretty cool. The VIPers started the evening by just drinking the lager, some even just asking for a beer.

There were quite a few that were already Epic fans, more that were aware of the brand and thought it was pretty cool to have the beer at the VIP area.

One of the first people into the VIP tent went straight for the Double Stout. I said do you know what you are drinking. He said “yes, I love stouts and this is one of my favourites.” Wow, great start.

Even though we had more Lager bottles than anything else, we ran out of it first. The people moved to Pale Ale and IPA, which everyone seemed to enjoy. Many people sampled the range of beers we had, with quite a few trading up to the more flavourful beers from the Lager.

The best benefit of running this bar was we got VIP passes. The bar was closed as soon as Eminem came on stage and we got to enjoy his whole show. This was a super fun way to experience a concert.

Special thanks to Bernie, Joanie, Rob, Paul and Ayesha for giving us the opportunity to be part of the show, and the Epic A-Team (you know who you are, we need to talk about the name though) for running things so smoothly.