Counterfeit Lolita?

Haha, counterfeit beer is just a ridiculous idea.

 

It does sound ridiculous but then again anything can be counterfeit.

 

Those aren't bottle numbers. Pretty sure its just a barrel number or batch or something. My label was pretty faded and rough. The missing chain could have just been a manufacturer error, those do happen. Counterfeit beer might make sense for wales on ebay, but not in a retail store.

 

This strikes me as one of the more ridiculous beers to counterfeit. It's relatively obscure, with a style/flavor that's hard to fake and/or expensive to refill with a clone. If someone is really going to go through the effort to counterfeit, they're going to do it with something where they hype-meter is through the roof, nobody will really know the difference, and there is a huge margin for profit. i.e. stick regular bourbon county into Rare bottles, or put KBS into CBS bottles with a splash of maple syrup.

Also I wouldn't expect them at a store. I'm positive plenty of fake bottles have been sold on Ebay, but a store would get in way too much trouble. More than likely it was a printing error on the label...

 

Should have gone home and printed up a fresh fifty to buy it.

 

You'd make a poor (or generous) counterfeiter, lol. If you're already going to be breaking the law and doing something obscenely unethical, why not just completely maximize profit and put the cheapest BA stout on the market into the Rare bottle? Or if Ebaying it then just add any stout at all.

You could pour Breakfast Stout into a CBS bottle and I'd wager that half of the community would either never notice/assume it was supposed to taste that way, or would imagine/convince themselves that they did indeed taste maple and bourbon despite the lack thereof...

 

I agree that some wouldn't know the difference. But personally, having done side by side tastings of the BCS family and the Breakfast stout family, they are fairly easy to distinguish from each other. Then again, that may be based on having them all in one sitting. Rare though is its own beast, totally diff than the other variants IMO.

 

I'm sure you could slip just about anything past most people, but if you're in it for the long run you would need to be better than that. There are people who will know they're not drinking anything close to the mark with the beer by itself. Then there are those that have had it before, those that will do side by sides, etc, etc. I always figured you would need to at least come close to not get caught sooner rather than later.

 

Ah hell, we've come this point huh.

I thought the beer community was better than this.

I propose a toast to my apparent naivety...

Sigh...

 

By "this" do you mean:

(a) jumping to conclusions​

(b) rumor-mongering​

(c) paranoia​

(d) all of the above​

 

D.

 

After reading this I had a day dream about Greg Hall in a Willy Wonka costume welcoming me to the brewery after finding a rare Golden ticket under an odd Lolita label...

 

Just don't drink from ANY glass of beer that you haven't personally seen poured from a bottle or drawn from a tap and has been in your possession the entire time afterwards... or that dream becomes a nightmare.

 

Are you referring to Greg's unfortunate "incident"?

But seriously, somebody should make this movie. Beery Wonka?

 

I'm not saying that an experienced palate could not detect a difference, I know that I certainly could. And yes, Rare does taste different from regular BCBS. That said, most people trading for a Rare likely have never had one. And if I put BCBS in a Rare bottle and poured it for someone at a tasting, they might say that it tastes very similar to regular BCBS, but I highly doubt even a serious beer drinker would cry foul having never tasted the difference.

If you are a career CBS counterfeiter then I agree. But the thing is that there are only so many bottles of CBS going around, only so many labels, etc. At some point (likely within 1-3 bottles) the counterfeiter will run out of product to slip past the masses - that is unless they have regular access to Founders style bombers and can print their own labels. Given all this, the counterfeit beer industry is most likely going to be extremely limited in scope no matter how enterprising the person.

Getting caught is a whole other debate, because calling out a counterfeiter in any meaningful way publicly exposes you to evidence of illegally shipping alcohol/purchasing it in Ebay, etc. And even if you could skirt this or didn't care, how do you actually prove your case? Even saving the contents of the bottle open you up to all sorts of holes: lightstruck, oxidized, improperly stored/handled/shipped, bad batch, bottle infection, etc, etc. Or - the counterfeiter could just claim you drank the real beer and filled the bottle with something else and that you were in fact the faker and not them.

Overall though, I think the whole argument is pretty pointless. While this does likely happen once in a while, I doubt it is very prevalent, and I extremely doubt that this is happening anywhere on a retail level. It's one thing to cheat a random person or two on Ebay or BA and something else entirely to jeopardize your business and livelihood just to sell a hand full of fake rare beer to make some extra pocket change...

 

Family Guy had an episode along those lines. It was quite funny, too!

Here is a song from it:

 

Haha spot on!

 

That silver stuff will fade off completely with age. The Lolita without silver might be from a previous year. It's a long shot, but it's worth noting. Some friends and I recently did a Pere Jacques vertical and the labels of the older vintages showed no metallic bling, though you could see where it once was.