Refunds for 2015 Regular BCBS and 2015 Prop

There is no mothership. They operate independently of AB.

 

I wonder how long that arrangement would continue if GI screws this up?

 

Not long. In similar situations other Mega Corps have been known to just close down or to break up and sell off losing units after stripping them of the people worth keeping around.

 

Maybe they screwed up in purpose to get away from AB.

 

Well, here's a supposition.

Background: I once had to return a case of a beer when the brewery involved had found that it developed off flavors, apparently because of a contamination resulting from the filling tubes between tank and bottling line had not been thoroughly cleaned. Similarly a few years back Bell's released and did eventually recall some Two Hearted which had developed off flavors after shipping and that they also attributed to organism growth in lines between tank and bottling line.

Now in the GI case we have an organism involved not previously thought to cause problems for beer. It's my understanding that typically when sterilizing/cleaning something the concern is with killing off any organisms believed to be harmful but that may not include all organisms. (For, for example, a few years back I was on a Committee evaluating the work of a researcher who was credited with having figured out what caused the human equivalent of "Mad Cow" disease. Part of what he found was that for a while sterilization of surgical instruments that was normally sufficient didn't kill off that particular microorganism. So a few patients developed C-J from "contaminated" surgical instruments.)

So lets suppose that the tanks on those days received a thorough cleaning before use but that it was a wee bit less thorough than the other days when the cleaning procedures were sufficient. (Typically humans climb into large enough tanks and clean them after use or before re-use and it doesn't seem to be the same person every single day.) Or suppose that the particular micro organism at fault is typically found in a small floor area that some people walk through before cleaning the tanks while other cleaning folks never happen to go that way (we humans tend to be creatures of habit... :-)). Or perhaps that particular "harmless" organism is also to be found on the seats of one El train car but not another.

Result: An apparently random pattern of "bad" days and good days.

Note: Still speculation at this point, but even though there are still gaps in our knowledge, the pattern seems to fit.

 

There is no way whatsoever that AB would ever tamper with their own "sub products", especially the most famous beer from their most famous craft brewery. I'm sure that they are well aware of how toxic their name is in the craft community. People like to remind them all the time on Facebook

 

on the tanks, i was expecting something more along the lines of :
perhaps GI is confident tank #1 & tank #4 were contaminated with Lacto; & further, GI is confident neither of those affected tanks were used on the proposed "safe dates". admittedly though, your plot is much better & the scenario much more intricate.

 

Interesting possibility. The mutiple tank, different days of use possibility is one I hadn't thought of yet since we don't really know how much equipment they are working from. (e.g., how many bottling lines, how many tanks, etc.)

Although I've not seen an operation the size of GI the tours I've been on have led me to believe a pretty standard procedure is use enough pre tested barrels and mix enough the ones that pass into a daily "batch" which is basically the amount they expect to be able to bottle in a day. When finished with bottling for the day and/or before reuse the next day, in at least some cases, the equipment is cleaned typically cleaned so that they are sure there isn't a breeding ground for micro-organisms. But it also seems possible that cleaning might not be every day.

As I mentioned in some earlier post, this exercise is a lot like working with a jig saw puzzle without seeing the picture. (And quite possibly without having all the pieces to assemble. )

 

regardless, the fact they are being bombarded with claims of spoiling product for dates they claim are not affected suggests their methodology wasn't completely accurate. it also seems their focus precedes the bottling line. does that indicate the individual line(s), individual feed(s) theories start to fade?

 

Not sure yet since not only are there claims of off flavors in dates not thought by GI to be impacted, there are still reports of perfectly fine bottles on dates identified as problems. With the latter it's hard to know if those were stored differently from others when temperature can influence speed of change. With the former it's hard to sort out those that are real and those that may result from factors such as the power of suggestion. (With the existence of "mass hysteria" being pretty well documented phenomenon such is not beyond the realm of possibility.)

Now throw in your point about possible problems with Q&A methodology (e.g. the reported difficulty of culturing the bacterium) the final results on "bad" days may not actually be in yet as they seem to believe.

The slightly scary thing about this whole situation is that if one of the industry standard setters for successful barrel aging programs and quality testing has been blind sided by this bacteriu, what are the implications for the future of barrel aging programs in general. I suspect that anyone with a barrel aging program and Q&A procedures in place is watching this play out with bated breath.

 

Another possibility is that they weren't keeping extensive enough "libraries" for future testing. For such a large operation that might mean they need to save samples from each barrel, each combination of barrels, each bottling time, etc. All I know is that I bought multiple cases of regular and a case of BW, from multiple locations, and all were "affected batches", and everything I've opened in the last 4 months has been a straight drain pour.

It's hard to even hypothesize "what went wrong" when so many dates/batch times, and "variants" went wrong. It's truly a disaster. If It wasn't AB-InBev I probably wouldn't be trying to get a refund, (see Spirit d'Armand). If they want "us" to come back though, we deserve a refund. Smart on them.

 

Look at the bright side, is there a tastier way to get your daily probiotics?

 

Well this was depressing

 

Were any of them good?

 

I've noticed some people sending in a single picture of their entire bottle lot. Is this required?

 

1 bottle neck label. 1 photo of the bottling date and time on the bottle label, clearly readable = refund for 1 bottle

Repeat as needed until all bottles processed.

See GI website for further details and the form to be filled out.

 

I won't know for awhile but I started with 18 bottles. I drank four & gifted four. Of the four I've opened they've all been fine but people locally have had issues with 10/9.

 

Lol, I feel your pain, but that look like a police line-up for BCBS. "Ma'am, can you pick out which stout uncapped your son?"

 

Cracked my prop this evening, definitely some off flavors. Poured it out and drank my regal which tasted fine

 

I had a badly soured one in April so held onto the rest of my case hoping for a refund opportunity. As soon as I got my refund sent out, I opened another one thinking I might have better luck given the bottle variation and all. Nope...still gross. I'll probably keep opening them here and there, who knows, maybe I'll get lucky with one of them.