Refunds for 2015 Regular BCBS and 2015 Prop

my thing is this. whether this issue will meet the clinical, scientific definition of "infected", is important on the producer end, and GI should be doing every test & procedure possible to nail down the issue. on the consumer end, whether it's ""infection"" or just significantly "off" really should be irrelevant in terms of what the right thing to do is. the product is not what's expected. it sucks to be you when that happens but we all know what's right.

& before fanboy #1 & the cavalry charge to remind us "off" flavors are an accepted risk/factor in production, remember, in advance of release, GI drain poured a great deal of Coffee due to "off" flavors. that the rest of their Bourbon County line is gradually turning into "off" flavors says a few things about their actions or inaction on this matter. it's hard to argue there was no advance warning the product [might] be compromised. when they offered refunds on barleywine, that in & of itself was an admission the science & investigation on their end either wasn't good/thorough enough or was very good/thorough but inconclusive. either way, precedent sort of screws up their "unprecedented" response. MHO.

 

Well, that's the first time anyone ever accused me of being a fanboy (as opposed to being a pedant bound on understanding the real issues rather than those being made up out of incomplete information or outright mis-information). Must say your comment reveals a few new interesting things.

Enjoy your day.

 

I assumed the "unprecedented" was in reference to scale.

 

lol. NOT you!!!!! first paragraph was direct response to your quote. the second paragraph was offered for actual fanboys.

i'm not saying we don't need to know, but truth be told, at this point, i'm not holding my breath on GI being 100% open about whatever transpired. we're likely to hear something but what percent of the whole story/truth is anybody's guess. i feel like we all know what's right though.

 

That's how I took it too.

 

i do too. but, my point was they had evidence early on. coffee. could be different circumstances, i guess, but the thing is if the 1st variant bottled had to be pre-tossed due to "off" issues & they tossed it on their own acknowledgement, it sounds weak at this stage to even begin with a response like : Our brewers tasted/tested everything and it's fine.

did their brewers test the coffee that they issued refunds on? did their brewers test the barleywine they offered refunds on? if they didn't why NOT since they already knew a portion of coffee went bad? if they did & concluded the coffee portion that was released was fine & the barleywine was fine -- it tells us their testing/investigative measures didn't mean much for those two prior cases. i have to assume the same safeguards they've cited now, failed before. their position seemed to be shock or disbelief the same was happening again (now).

 

That's absolutely fair. We're also all sitting here trying to dissect a 2 sentence instagram response that is the closest anyone has gotten to an actual answer from GI (I emailed and got a "we take these reports very seriously blah blah blah looking into it blah blah blah"). Given their track record with last year's batch, I'd hope for something a bit more forthcoming.

 

Agree 100% with the above comments from @Highbrow and @njk82. Not saying I expected them to offer a refund at the first report, but it does feel that at least some of the responses from GI have been more dismissive and/or defensive than I'd expect given that they already acknowledged a widespread problem with 2 of the variants. It really shouldn't be much of a leap to believe people when dozens of them start reporting markedly sour flavors in BCBS.

 

I really have nothing to offer on this. I don't know exactly what's wrong with the BCBS, and I have no idea what's detectable chemically, so between the two, I cannot assign blame for not detecting it since I don't know that it can be detected. This isn't the first time this type of thing has happened, so either other's aren't testing or it cannot be detected initially. Heck, even with reports here, it's still not clear if this is a batch thing, an intermittent thing within multiple batches, or just varying rates of going bad.

In addition, they may have thought they knew the source and had reason to believe it was limited to the coffee variant and the barleywine. In that case, surprise at reports of the regular BCBS isn't really out of line.

It seems like people are just itching to be indignant about this. This is really just evolving over the last couple weeks and already their response is changing. Personally, I'm going to sit back and see how they ultimately respond, not hang them when they don't offer refunds and heartfelt apologies at the first report of off flavors.

 

I can't help but wonder if this does become a big deal, would AB consider pulling the plug on the Goose Island barrel program? Not this year of course since they are already in the barrels, but next year?

 

to be fair, i recognize GI is in a very difficult situation. i appreciate that much. from the consumer camp, i'm basically out lining points consumers should be taking into account & questioning at least in their own minds when told : "Our brewers have tested it and it's fine / no off flavors were detected".

also i differ slightly on them being completely shocked on BCBS turning. for one, thus far we concluded Coffee was the first variant bottled, Barleywine was the last variant bottled. given the precedence in scale of the 1st & final bottlings, to me it takes away a bit of the shock value that the same or something similar in transpiring with bottlings between. especially when they found something wrong enough with the first variant to drain it beforehand.

i can accept they can't figure out what/why. that doesn't mean, given what little we do know, anyone should accept : "Our brewers tasted and tested it". surely they did that before & to no avail with Coffee & BW. knowing that, why's it hard to accept or believe a similar situation is occurring with regular?

 

I'm wondering after people's (over)reaction to this if we won't see not only Goose Island but other breweries pulling back on their barrel aging programs, which would be a travesty.

I have had nothing but delicious BCBS. I have had bad BCBCS and BCBBW and did not get in one the refund. I'm not too terribly upset over it, but I can see how others might be. I've also had bad barrel aged beers from other breweries. Does it come with the territory or is it fixable?

Based on the sheer quantity of BCBS produced and the fact that a good portion of it was good, I think it is unreasonable to demand GI refund money from this. My only personal demand is transparency and information so that I can make better purchasing decisions in the future. GI seems to indicate that they know what the problem with BCBCS and BCBBW was and have fixed it. Let us know what the problem was and what you did to fix it. If you don't know and say it comes with the territory, let us know that too.

 

Cracked a regular last night and was very tasty, first one I have had since release week, thought they were "hot" but nearly 6 months later and it seems to have settled nicely, very smooth. I also experimented a bit with half the bottle and put some coconut extract in it and it was sublime(may be the closest I get to Prop 14)

 

Opened a regular two nights ago and thought it was the best bcbs I've ever tried.

 

I keep seeing mention that GI knew about the issues with coffee and dumped it off. The only thing I could parse through was someone on BA heard from someone at GI that this occurred. Is this the proof everyone keeps referring to or was there something else? I know that the release during the refunds mentioned that Coffee and BW did not meet GI 'standards', but didn't see anything about Coffee being dumped prior to release.

 

Ahh, OK.

Since I wasn't posting about what is or is not the right or wrong thing to do for consumers I mistook what you were meaning to say. In that post intent was only to address the issues associated with determining what was the real problem for the beer itself and the apparent difficulties of diagnosing when one is dealing with an infection or some other cause of off flavors. The "right thing" to do about it is a separate and seperable issue.

Given the GI history of transparency prior to this year's developments I'm not so doubtful yet about what they will or will not say once they've completed their testing, etc. Remembering that this situation is in fact unprecedented for them in its size and scope, and given the spottiness of the reports of problems, I actually can sympatize a bit with their reluctance to make a public statement at this time that comes down either on one side or the other.

In some ways this whole incident reinforces my thinking that GI is using a zero based budgeting system and as a wholly owned subsidiary does not have access to the global resources of ABInBev outside of this year's budget and what it will support. I'm currently thinking that the decisions they make now may well impact their future well being.

 

besides numerous others saying the same, i've heard it in person on Black Friday and various other occasions including from GI personnel on-site. while it's not science, i already offered what i think is pretty sound logic on it being correct, several times. also the mention from GI staff was generally offered as a justification as to why there was so little coffee available & the allocation per customer was so much lower than regular & BW. based on these current developments, it would not surprise me if GI wishes it had never been mentioned at all.

the other logic i'd re-offer, was in response to a very poignant question a few BAs asked. & you have to admit, all the coffee everybody obtained had a single bottle date. wanna bet they would have had at least 1 more if not several more dates, except the significant amount some question whether was dumped is precisely the reason they didn't? from a logical standpoint, i believe it's true.

 

I agree that seems more than just a coincidence, just wasn't sure if I missed a press release.

 

To those that have said "give them time" or stated that we are being unreasonable or "piling on" GI about the issue...

While this threads is only about a month old, I called GI directly about the issue 3 weeks before posting a threads about the infection (my thread was posted at almost the same time as this one). I tried to reach out to them directly first and was blown off. And they only reason I reached out was because I had been seeing other reports of BCBS "not tasting right" for about 2 weeks which prompted me to open a couple of my bottles (some of which were not 21OCT15 and therefore tasted fine). So, there have been reports for over 2 months about this issue. I understand it takes time to teat these things but how much time really? How long does it take to plate samples of the reported bottling dates and see what grows? It seems like that GI has definitely changed their tune going from "our brewers detected no off flavors. No refunds" to "we are investigating"

I just think it's odd if you knew you had an issue already with the rest of the line that you wouldn't be more proactive when people started contacting you about it. It didn't take other breweries this long to admit they had an issue when they'be had reports of infection

 

Compared to another Midwestern brewery with multiple labels reporting off flavors in their BA stouts after only five months, I'd call this pretty open-minded and maybe even progress.

Cough cough OddSide cough cough