Rating an infected beer

If you taste a beer that is musty, infected, oxidized, phenolic, or otherwise faulted, do you still enter a review?


If it's lightstruck from a bad bottle shop or tastes of line cleaner, I can see where it's not the brewery's fault that you're not tasting what they made.
But I had a wit that was all wet cardboard on tap at the brewery - are they responsible for how their beer tastes, or do they get a do-over?

 

Not brewers fault = no beer review, but a negative review for the bottle shop.
Brewers fault = negative beer and brewery review. They are responsible and should know better.

 

If you bought that beer then go ahead and review it.

 

I agree with this protocol. It doesn't mean you can't revisit and update your review later. If that is part of the experience though, then I am going to write it down. Although, I have listed in my reviews before, that I thought it could have been a bad bottle or what the issue was that seemed off. That way I know to look for it next time and see if it was a one time issue or if that beer is always that way.

 

9 times out of 10 yes I review it. A bottle that can be skunked can still be fixed if the brewery decided to not use clear or green glass. Looks like Innis & Gunn started learning this lesson...

If you get a meal at a restaurant you paid money for and they screw up your entrée do you eat it, or send it back to the kitchen ?

If I am at a brewery and having beers I think are poor they absolutely get a bad review, that is a place that should know how to do it and present the correct image of their product. First line of defense as far as I am concerned I can think of one place I went to, and even bought bottles in their tasting room and tried them and they were not great.

I can only think of a few rare instances where I didn't review a bad bottle.

 

If I feel confident that the beer I just drank is not representative of the usual quality of the beer I sought out, I will give the beer a second shot before rating. Historically, I'm more consistent with rating via Untappd as compared to BA, but I'm making effort to more consistently rate on BA, as this site is my primary source when considering an unknown (to me) beer. If I drink a beer and it's just bad, then I rate it accordingly.

 

Depends. If its my first time drinking a beer I will review the beer if its gone bad, my review is for my experience with the beer. If I come across the beer again that is not infected or gone bad I will then update that review to reflect that.

A few weeks ago I was out at a bar and had a Jai Alai that was over 3 months old. It tasted terrible. Is it the breweries fault that a bar is serving old beer, should they be more on top of quality control for their product? Maybe, I dont know.

I've had the beer before and loved it, its a fantastic beer fresh. Since I have reviewed it in the past I simply wrote an email to Cigar City letting them know that a bar was serving their beer not at its peak, never received a response. I wasn't looking for anything I was just simply informing them.

 

Review it making sure you say it is infected etc. If later you get better bottles update your review. I would tend to leave the old bad one in unless I get a lot of good ones. Then I might delete it.

 

I had an exception to this last fall when I drank a beer on tap that did not taste anything like what was advertised, it tasted like pumpkin when it was a DIPA. I asked the bartender kindly if they had a Pumpkin beer on the line previously, and of course they had, oops. Please clean your lines! I rate the place not the beer in this case.

 

Of the few I've had, I don't review when I know it's an issue and hopefully a non-common occurrence.

 

I don't, which is why I never review sours

 

There are many opportunities for a beer to get screwed up between the brewery and my glass (distributor, importer, retailer) and if there is a possibility that someone other than the brewer is responsible for the beer's condition then i don't review it.
In a bar when the beer is off, it is often bad sanitation on the part of the bar and I don't review the beer. If a bottle of beer is infected or exhibits some other problem at the brewery such as poor sanitation or cheesey hops that is the brewers fault and I review the beer.

If the beer tastes like wet cardboard that is a problem of age and could be anyone's fault. If the brewer does not bother putting a date code on the bottle, then that is at least partially the brewer's fault. If the beer has a date code and it is way past its prime, then the problem is with the distrubutor, retailer, and me for not reading the date code.

If the beer is in a green or clear bottle and smells like a skunk, that is the brewer's fault for poor bottle selection and my fault for trusting the brewer. If it is in a brown bottle and is skunky that is more often due to the distributor or the retailer.

 

If I know the beer is not accurate to what was intended (infected, way past date...) I do not rate\review.

 

I'll likely review it anyway, just with a caveat that I felt like something was suspect. It's kinda fun to project 'what might have been'-type scenarios with brews like that.

 

Bad beers should be 'reviewed' but if the beer is likely bad because of the store's poor storage procedures, then a bad score on a review should not be given so as not to penalize the brewery. This may be why a revision to the BA site would be nice to have a rating option of NA - Not applicable (or NR - No Rating) so that the beer's rating is not penalized in the scoring process. But a comment would need to be written for why no rating was given.

 

how do you know where the problem arose? the distributor, the brewer, the bottling line, the employee who left it out of the cooler, etc etc etc. I taste a beer I review a beer. I will comment I think things are off, but still review the beer.

 

Depends on whether I am at fault. I lowered my Heady grade because of what I perceived to be a couple of inconsistent cans in my most recent experience. Brewery's fault. But I just drank a couple holdover 2014 Celebrations over the weekend. I thought they were mediocre, but I did not change my score because the lack of freshness is my fault.

 

In most cases you really don't know who is at fault if it's a probable storage issue, but a 'No Score' rating would avoid a penalty that you can't properly aim anywhere. However, if it's a brewing flaw that causes the beer to be bad, then by all means, score that beer downward.

 

An actual infection is so rare that it isn't really an issue...unless you are talking about wild yeast fermentation. I can't imagine it is even 1 in 1000. I would probably associate phenolic with a poor beer and rate accordingly. Musty and oxidized are characteristics I associate with old beer or poorly stored beer, which I probably wouldn't rate.

 

With the explosion of breweries & wood-aging beer, actual infections are way, way higher than 1 in 1000.

Just taking a glace at my reviews over the past many years, there's probably 30-40 out of 2,000 that have been infected, running the gamut from foully undrinkable to just starting down the other side of the hill. It's always interesting to get a beer like The Abyss (09) & be able to track the infection - the beer morphs from great, to muted, to questionable, to tart & fruity & sour. Not good, but interesting.