Should a change in recipe be pro-actively acknowledged?

every year people say that "beer x" has changed the recipe. And people get mad and confused. Theres so much that can vary as well. The grains might not have a great season, and taste different. Spices might not be as strong, peppers could have less heat. Theres so much variant in ingredients.

 

To me, beer recipies are like intellectual property. It belongs to the company or individual who owns it and we have no right to know anything about it. However, if a brewery changes or tweaks a recipe, it's up to the market to determine whether the new offering is comparable, better or worse. This year, for example, I thought Nugget Nectar tasted different and although I eagerly anticipate its release every year, I didn't buy too much of it this year but I will try again next year. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy something you don't care for.

 

I think it would be nice for the consumer to know. Some breweries already do this. Epic out of Utah has a line of beers where they purposely change recipes all the time for the same beer.

 

YES, I agree. 100%. If there is a change the dedicatec onsumers hsould be aware.

 

2 words for you "new coke"

 

A few barleywines deep, are we?

 

Of course, for every "New Coke" disaster, there's been a thousand successful products proclaiming "NEW! IMPROVED!" OR "GREAT NEW TASTE!" on the packaging.

 

Yes - isn't advertising wonderful.

 

Changes in ingredient quality and changes in recipe are two separate things, one of which you have no control over. I thought a lot of the winter seasonal DIPAs this year weren't as good as the previous year, so I came to the hypothesis that hop harvests must not have been as good. That doesn't mean they changed their recipes.

On topic, if there's a significant change in the recipe, I think breweries should fess up. If it's something like going from 5 to 7% chocolate malt or adding the hops 10 minutes later in the boil, obviously that doesn't really matter as much to the consumer, but if you completely change malt recipes or hop types or yeast strain or the like, the consumer should know.

 

Sorry, youll see post after post after post about how this beer tastes different, they must have changed the recipe. Normally its due to difference in hops. Like for example, Founders changed the hop profile of Devil Dancer slightly this year. Got rid of the garlicy/onion flavor. Worked out well. Not worth sending out a PR statement about.

 

I'm actually very surprised that more recipes are tweaked/changed more frequently. If your beer isn't well received or just mediocre why not rebuild it from the ground up?

 

I've seen plenty of threads and posts about that and think that more often it's a case of people misremembering. If breweries threw in a blurb on their websites or FB pages or whatever about a recipe tweak, it would help dispell at least a few of those. Considering how active most breweries are now on FB and Twitter, it would be easy to say something like, "This year's batch of Devil Dancer has fewer Summit hops and more ____." You certainly don't have to have a big PR event over it.

 

Sometimes it can be a pure mistake. Someone I know tells me evrynow and then about accidentally adding too much of an ingredient at their brewery, but they don't want to lose the money so they just go ahead with it.

 

I kind of wish all breweries would just include ingredients on the labels.

 

But they do, generally. Water, malt, hops and yeast. It's the amounts and varieties of each that's the difference. If the brewery used other ingredients they are usually on the label, if not the name of the beer.
Or are you saying they should say they used 55% pale malt, 40% Maris otter etc, 25% nugget hops etc, such and such strain of yeast....

 

I don't need the full recipe, but it would be nice to at least know which types of hops, malts, or adjuncts are in the beer.

 

LOL! Just a few.. and I tried to correct the errors but only made it worse.

 

What constitutes enough of a change to warrant an announcement/label change? Beer is an agricultural product. Hop oils change, sometimes drastically, from year to year & barley sourcing is very dependent on weather events. I would argue that no two years of any hop-forward beer (like SN Celebration) could ever really be considered to have identical ingredients.

What the brewers are trying to do is create a beer that is consistent in flavor, character, abv, etc. They may need to make drastic changes based on the ingredients available to achieve that goal.

 

These beer recipes are trade secrets for the companies that brew the beer, which is a form of intellectual property. This protects the company from having competitors produce their product. A trademark protects the name (i.e. Bigfoot in the context of Sierra Nevada), but that name would be worthless if everyone knew the exact recipe.