If you drove down Fayette Street last night at 5:00 p.m. you couldn’t be blamed for thinking you got the day and time wrong for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The sidewalk from Flanigan’s Boathouse up to East 2nd Avenue was filled with people waiting in line in hopes of getting a glass of a very-hard-to-get beer, Russian River Brewing’s Pliny the Younger.

The Santa Rosa, California brewery offers this beer in very limited quantities each year. For craft beer enthusiasts, saying you have had a glass of Pliny the Younger is considered a must. A press release from the brewery describes the beer:

Pliny the Younger is considered a “triple” IPA, simply meaning that it is higher in alcohol and has tons of hops. The alcohol should finish at about 10.25%, although it is remarkably dry for the amount of malt used in the recipe. It is loaded with hop flavors, bitterness, and aromatics. The hops used in this year’s recipe are of excellent quality: Simcoe, Warrior, Chinook, Centennial, Amarillo, CTZ, Comet and Azacca. We brewed Younger for the first time in 2005 as a winter seasonal, building upon the Pliny the Elder recipe while pushing the envelope with malt, hops, and alcohol just to see how far we could go!

Flanigan’s Boathouse turned the event into a fundraiser for Julianna’s Journey, which is fundraising to provide a local girl who is in a wheelchair with an accessible van.The Boathouse donated all the revenue from the keg, which raised $2,353.00.