Infected Barrel Aged Yeti

Bottle 200 was delicious in every way.

 

Well...it didn't take long to open that bottle now did it

 

I disagree. Unless people start posting reviews about their infected bottle(s), how else would we learn whether it's widespread or not? Yes, there's the forums of course -- but not everyone uses the forums. Plus, it'd be quite easy to miss the thread.

If you purchase any other product and it comes to you fucked up, you're going to review it as such -- whether it's an isolated incident or not. Why wouldn't we do the same with beer? These breweries have an obligation to make sure the beer is being sold to the customers as intended -- especially at the prices they charge.

 

Because craft beer is not expected to have a 100% perfection rate. It's just the nature of the product. Small breweries operating on small budgets making a food product just aren't going to get it right every time. None of them do. Further to it, the problems often creep in after they leave the brewer's hands. It's not the brewer's fault if some store left a case of beer out back in the 95 degree direct sunlight all afternoon, or somebody left their purchase in the trunk in Texas for a weekend.

Think of it less like ordering a trinket off of Amazon and more like buying a piece of fruit at the grocery store. Would you give Chiquita a bad review because a banana was sitting there bruised?

Now, if it is widespread, that's where I think people should do reviews, because that is the actual beer that was released. Though you do have a perfectly valid point about "how do we know it is infected until people start reviewing it as infected?".

 

These arguments are completely irrelevant to the discussion here, and don't apply at all. We're talking about INFECTED beer. That's all on the brewery.

I don't even understand why you would bother making those two arguments. I've seen your name around here enough to know that you completely understand the difference between infected beer and lightstruck beer.

 

I've had many delicious Yetis, whether Oaked, Chocolate, Espresso, whatever. I'm sitting on a BA version as well, haven't opened it yet. My opinion of Great Divide won't change if it is infected though. Shit happens, Great Divide still makes great beers. Hibernation is so good too. Wish I could get them here in Vermont.

 

Like I said, if it is infected in small quantites, IMO that is simply to be expected from a small craft brewery.

As for the bruising/skunked argument, you and I understand the difference, but most people do not. I've seen tons of reviews talk about beers being infected when they are clearly just skunked or they are reviewing bottles of ancient IPA's. That's why it's dangerous for people to review beers that taste off - it's often nothing to do with the brewery.

 

So we should just give all infected beers a pass? No thanks. I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) take a look at the reviews on this site before buying beers I've never had before. If a beer is infected, but this is deliberately not mentioned in the reviews, they have lost a lot of value for me.

 

Ugh. No, that's not what I'm saying. This discussion is getting fruitless. But one more time...

If a small brewery produces 100,000 bottles of beer in a year, then some small percentage of those are going to have a problem. This is true for every small brewery. Nobody short of Budweiser has anything close to 100% quality control. So if a small brewery gets 20 reviews on a beer, and one of them happens to be infected, reviewing that beer will hurt their ratings. This would be fine if every other small brewery with 20 reviews also had an infected review, but law of averages says most infected beers will not end up getting reviewed.

Point being, if you get scared away by a review of a bad beer, that is silly, because every beer out there has bottles with issues at one point or another.

Now, if, instead of, say, 100 bottles out of those 100,000 are infected... there are 50,000 bottles that are infected, then that is a real problem beyond the bounds of expected reasonable quality control and is fair game.

 

I still disagree. Whether it's 1 bottle or 1,000 bottles that are infected, the reviews should still reflect it. If it's an unavoidable aspect of a barrel aging program, then folks reading reviews should understand not to overreact to one or two reviews indicating infection. And it'll give the reader a barometer of that particular brewery's quality control.

Now, I know the counterpoint will be "Well not everyone knows that infections are unavoidable in barrel aging programs!" (assuming that's even correct -- I honestly don't know). Well seeing those reviews will start their education process.

Regardless of the frequency, I see no reason that infected bottles should not be reviewed.

Too much deference is paid to brewers around here. They're not annointed with holy spirit. If they brewed an f'd up beer, review it as such.

 

Agreed - infections generally don't stem from poor handling by distributors or retailers, they are caused by problems at the brewery. As such, they're a reflection on the brewer and should be included in reviews. It's not a personal thing where we want to trash a brewer, but if they release an infected beer, it should be noted so that people are aware before they spend their money on it. Especially if they release an infected beer and don't own up to it in a public manner.

And honestly, I don't fully buy the argument that infections should be an accepted small part of barrel aged beers. Two points on that front:
1) Goose Island has been releasing BCBS for years - have there ever been reports of infection on it?

2) Breweries generally charge a premium for barrel aged products and are responsible for the product they release - why should we give a pass on something that someone else is turning a profit on? I love the craft beer community and have had almost universally positive experiences dealing with brewers and brewery employees, but at the end of the day, we're paying for beer that we expect to be of a certain quality. If they can't consistently release a barrel aged product as intended, they should change their process and/or re-think whether it's a good idea to release barrel aged beers.

 

Rating a beer you know is infected is not logical, as the system is in place right now. If each batch was reviewed as a separate rating, I would agree to review it as infected. But to ruin an entire rating based on a single batch does not make sense.

Should there be a way to notify other people that there's a possibility it's infected? Yes. But to rate a beer based on something the brewery did not intend for, nor anticipate, you're basically slandering a beer and bringing down it's overall average because of a one-time accident. Say a beer has been rated 100 for 5-years straight, then the brewery makes a mistake and one year it's bad and the rating drops to 88. That's not a true representation of the quality of beer. If brewed as originally intended, you just "poisoned the well" on an otherwise 100 point beer. And most likely would be a 100 point beer in future batches.

If you want to rate the brewery based on an infected beer and discussing their QA/QC and customer service on how they handle situations like this, that's completely appropriate.

FWIW, every single person I've heard of that has contacted Great Divide about their infected Yeti has been compensated and/or reimbursed with BA Old Ruffian. IMO, they have taken care of those who had issues and contacted them about it. On their end, Great Divide has done testing on the batch during bottling. Due to small batch sizes it's nearly impossible to test all the bottles and are unable to verify an infected batch until people contact them about it. To do a voluntary recall on the entire batch without proof of infection is unheard of.

 

That is some crazy reasoning, IMO. Rogue certainly didn't intend for Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon to suck donkey nuts. But it sucks donkey nuts all the same. Does that mean I should give it an A anyway, because they intended for it to be a good beer?

Intentions don't matter. What matters is the final product. If the final product that's in your glass blows donkey nuts, and it's due to brewer error, then I think that's fair game for the review. Indeed, as someone that frequently looks up reviews before buying/trying new beers, I WANT the reviewers to tell if their beer was infected or otherwise off.

Now you're free to use whatever criteria you want for your personal reviews. But if your goal is to provide a review that's useful to others too, then IMO you should tell me if your beer was infected. If you're not, then your reviews are considerably less worthwhile.

 

This is a failure in logic. What you just said was that Rogue did not intend for you to dislike the taste of their beer. The truth is, Rogue did intent for the beer to taste the way it does. Whether you like it or not is subjective.

I was not referring to your opinion of how it tastes, I was referring to how the brewery intended for it to taste. Rogue intended for it to taste that way, some people love it or hate it, but that was Rogue's recipe and that's what every bottle tasted like. To take that same logic and apply it to an infected beer is not logical because the brewery did not want the beer to taste that way, that's not what the recipe called for, it's completely different.

If the beer was infected, what I would suggest is to not review the beer, but review the brewery in how it handles the infection. Why would I remotely suggest you still rate the beer somehow not taking the infection into account? That's absurd. If it's not infected, rate it. If it is, don't. That's what I'm saying. Re-read my original post. If you come across a beer and it tastes like crap, rate it. So long as it's not infected, it's probably just a poor recipe.

This would all be a lot easier if we could rate batches.

 

That's like saying that a student who got 100% on 5 tests but then flunked their 6th test should maintain a 100% average because they didn't intend to flunk their test. Obviously brewers don't intend to put out infected beer, but I also doubt that brewers intend to put out beers where a given flavor isn't fully integrated, or where there are obvious flaws that people review all the time.

What's the usefulness of reviews that only present a beer in its best case scenario?

 

I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting under all intents and purposes all the ratings are judging the beer in the same original condition.... subjectivity in ratings is in the eye of the beholder, but you can't give 4 people all the same beer, then give a 5th person an infected yeti and think that the rating should reflect the beer as it was supposed to be made.

 

It definitely reads that way.

Agreed.

It's not at all clear what you're trying to say here. Of course it should hurt the ratings, isn't that the point? I'm not sure why you're comparing one small brewery with another. What does that have to do with any of this? I would go further and say that most beers don't end up getting reviewed. But again I don't know why that matters for this discussion.

What you call scared away I call making an informed decision based on available data. Or maybe I'm less willing to take a risk than you are. Or perhaps I have less disposable income than you do and can't afford many $30 drainpours.

How are we supposed to know how many bottles (or what fraction of bottles) are infected if no one is mentioning that in the review? And who decides when the threshold of 'beyond the bounds of expected reasonable quality control' is met? You suggest 50% of bottles, why not 10%? 5%? That's 1 in 20; not many businesses could keep their doors open with even that 'low' (relative to 50%) failure rate.

 

Granted I guess you could make the point that it's impossible to do that since there are lots of varying conditions between the brewery and when it's tasted and I'm sure there are a lot of people who have unintentionally aged IPAs, or UV-affected beer...

 

This reasoning is ass-backwards. So let's say a brewery's QC changes and the beer sucks one year. By your logic we shouldn't review it that year. What if it sucks in year 2? Can we start reviewing in year 2? Year 3? Year 10?

Just review the damn beer that's in your glass. This isn't rocket science. Stop making up these arbitrary duties that we owe to the brewer. We don't owe them a damn thing. We paid for the beer, and we review the product we got in exchange for our money. This isn't charity.

 

Another failure in logic, taking something that is objective and trying to make it subjective. Taste is subjective. An infection is objective. Infections are not the same as a bad-recipe. Like I mentioned earlier, either don't rate it, or we need to be able to rate batches. Rate it whenever it's not infected.

Apparently logic is rocket-science for some.

Good grief, where did anyone in this entire thread suggest that we "owe" the brewer? We DON'T owe them a damn thing. We DID pay for the beer, and hence why the brewer typically refunds or exchanges the beer for a good one, one they intended to brew. I'd much rather get a good beer out of it than to just "settle" for an infected one.