Update: It is a stunt.

(Escondido, CA) – A homebrewer wins a competiton and comes to your brewery to brew a beer that will be available nationally soon thereafter. A week passes. What do you expect? A thank you card? Flowers? Nothing at all?

Or perhaps a ‘D’ rating in a video review on one of your beers?

That is exactly what happened in the case of Ryan Reschan, who recently helped brew the forthcoming Stone R&R Coconut IPA collaboration beer at Stone’s brewery in Escondido. Some additional context from Beer Geek Nation’s Youtube page:

At the recent 2013 National Homebrewers Conference I got to talk briefly with Stone Brewing’s own Mitch Steele as well as BGN’s own Ryan Reschan about the upcoming release of R&R Coconut IPA. The IPA was brewed by Ryan and Robert for the annual Stone AHA rally where the winning homebrew is selected and then brewed by Stone. Their beer obviously won and will be distributed nationally by Stone at the end of July.

In the video above, you can watch Reschan talk about the aforementioned beer. He and another homebrewer visited Stone on May 24th to brew it on the production system. According to WestcoasterSD, the brew day went well.

Fast-forward one week and Reschan posts this video, a review of Arrogant Bastard Ale.

There is some interesting adlib action going on there like, “they just named it Arrogant Bastard Ale which…apparently, was named after their CEO, Greg Koch.”

The commentary goes into more than just about what’s in the bottle…or glass. Reschan doesn’t dig the marketing shtick around the beer.

So Koch starts doing some responses to those doing video reviews of Arrogant Bastard Ale shortly after this video goes up…and finally gets around to responding to Reschan’s video.

Below is Koch’s response in a video released on July 2nd, about six weeks after Reschan’s video.

Reschan is taken aback by this and posts a response of his own to Koch’s response a week later.

That prompts yet another response from Koch, released just Monday.

These videos, seemingly personal in nature, are being posted on Stone’s official media channel and Stone has driven traffic to them through its Twitter page.

What it has effectively accomplished is more attention to the original review. Each of these videos have received around 1,000 hits at this point and that is only going to go up from here.

It never comes up once that Reschan was just in Stone’s brewery making beer with them. The timing is odd or at the very least, coincidental, but that seems to be a silver lining here in some way.

Stone’s event page is devoid of any mention of a release for this beer despite the fact that it being made available to the market within the next couple weeks.

Reschan is ineligible to win the competition again until 2017 due to competition rules. Hopefully, he and Koch meet up for a beer by that time.