Went to the release tonight and had a pretty good time. I got there at a little before 7 and the bar was crowded, but not packed. The bar played D/T on repeat until about 9, when they decided to throw on Awake instead
The band showed up individually around 7:30 and initially ducked into the green room (this was at a metal bar that has a small performance area, Metal Allegiance has played at this bar at least once). A little while later they started coming out for guest bartending gigs. First was JP and Mike Mangini, then Jordan and James, then Myung. Mangini definitely seemed the most into it as far as I'm thinking maybe he's into craft beer himself. The rest of the band were all personable while basically just hanging out behind the bar and handing out free beers. Unsurprisingly, JM seemed more content to just smile and nod at people than really hand out any beers
An hour at most after it started the band left. The bar ran out of cans of the beer by 8:45, and I left a little after 9.
I chatted for a few minutes with a friend of mine who works for the brewery DT partnered with for this. He told me that this isn't just a re-branding of an existing beer, the band came out to the brewery and spent an afternoon tasting through the brewery's lineup and talked likes and dislikes and the brewers took it from there. They plan on doing a much bigger run of this beer over the summer so that they can send a bunch of cans overseas to sell at the various festivals DT are playing. The band eventually wants to roll out multiple different label arts for the beer and then multiple different styles of beer.
My personal reaction (as a craft beer geek) is that the beer was very solid, but unlikely to particularly blow most peoples' minds. It's essentially a slightly more hoppy than usual pilsner, and well made.