450 North Brewing

I feel confident in saying that there wouldn’t have been a market for these drinks if the flavor was the same and the ABV was correctly listed at around 2%. That’s the incentive, plain and simple.

Beyond that, the proffered explanation is just so hilariously unbelievable.

 

Depends on the turn out of the next couple releases. But something will change down the line. I think the abv will catch up in these “beers” and then they “won’t be the same brah”. Hype dead.

 

Isn’t the XXL an “XXL” because of having even MORE fruit? Does that mean it’s possible they are using the exact same base and diluting it even further with more fruit?

 

64oz of 450N slushee - $25 --- 64 oz of OceanSpray - $3

They may have a problem competing in their new market.

 

What's weird to me is that there's plenty of low ABV fruited sour "smoothie" type stuff that gets plenty of hype/respect. I mean, The Answer's Joose stuff is right around 3%, and that's about as highly regarded as that style gets.

 

Not sure if the same base for both. I'm thinking no as the XXL was purportedly 10% and the XLs were purportedly 8%.

 

Which ones are 3%? Weve been crushing so many Answer crowlers the last few weeks, I think the lowest I saw was 6.5%. Some of them are 9%

 

I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but I can see this easing to some major fallout for a lot of other breweries making these slushy/smoothie styles.

Everyone saying the flavor sold these and not the abv is missing the point so badly. The abv definitely sold these. If people were buying these for flavor they would just buy fruit juice for a fraction of the price.

 

Lol. It doesn’t take world class knowledge, this is something people have been talking about for quite some time. This is a business that has played into the secondary market to expand so they don’t get to say “oh we just didn’t realize the most basic principles”

Yeh. These are bad, lying people.

No it was that it was 10%

 

I just did a quick search on Untappd on a desktop and a lot of them popped up as 3.5%, maybe I’d have to dig a little deeper though.

 

Yeah, given the hype power theyve tried to drive with their large allotments so that people will line up, I have no choice but to conclude that they both deceived people and did so for their long term gain. I pretty much think either theyre bad people, or theyre SO dumb that I cant trust them enough to consume their product. Either way, I'm out.

 

They knew what they were doing. Even as a shit home brewer I can correctly read abv and then know by adding more shit after my reading it would alter that measurement.

 

After hearing about exploding cans I was assuming the opposite of what I'm reading, essentially that 450 had not pasteurized their beer and it kept fermenting in the can.

Now that I'm hearing these beers were 2-3%, what's the explanation for the exploding cans?

 

I visited last summer, and they range. Some are lower (in that 3-4% range), whole imperial versions (like imperial ____ popsicle) is usually 8-10%. While “dangerously delicious” for the ABV, you could definitely tell the imperial were a higher ABV.

There’s a reason no one has liked your post. There was no honest mistake. (Even if it was, the absolute ineptitude would be so staggering that I would never buy a beer from them ever again. If you’re that incompetent, I don’t trust you to feed me poison that won’t poison me.)

 

My total guess is that they were fudging their abv calculations and counting the sugar from the fruit puree (added after fermentation) as fermentable.

 

Maybe. I guess I just don't get why they would knowingly do this. At least not the owners. And yes, I think they're that incompetent. I've met one of their brewers.

I never really got the hype for this style anyway. Maybe that's why I don't understand why making a beer that tastes like fruit juice at 3% is vastly different than making one at 8%. At the end of the day you're still paying way too much for fruit juice. Maybe that's what you should be pissed about.

 

This should kill the brewery. Not sure why anyone would ever buy their stuff again. I wouldn't.

 

In all honesty, if someone is that incompetent, I wouldn’t for a second put it past them that they “thought they could get away with it.” They themselves had probably dried the style from other breweries. I bet they thought they could get away with it, because “it’s not that different, and not that big of a deal.”

All joking aside, consider if this wasn’t 8% and 2.5% (that’s what the post from the testers showed). Consider if this was reported as being a 15% stout, and it was actually 9.5%. Or consider if this was a barrel proof whiskey, and instead of being 110 proof, had actually been watered down to 104.5.

Words matter, even though in this case it may feel less important to compare the difference between 2.5% ABV fruit purée and 8%. Although, to be fair, even if I wasn’t feeling buzzed, if I drank 2 glasses of the purportedly 8% or 10% fruit purée, I would not drive home, which may have cost me money. At 2.5% - that’s table beer. It’s practically water. I could have driven home because I was basically sober. That’s pretty god damn infuriating.

 

To add to my post:

There’s a lot of reasons to care, even if you are not sold on the moral infraction. One good reason is how expensive these are for the lack of alcohol (2.5%). As already pointed out, compared to other fruit options (non alcoholic, or even at the level of daiquiri), this is a ridiculous up-charge. That’s reason enough. Although some people drink beer only (or mostly) for the flavor, not everyone does. If they were not going to get the 8-10%, they probably would never have bought them.

 

It’s been an interesting study in human behavior to read through comments on Instagram (although a wise man once told me to never read the comments). Some just don’t care and staunchly state they will continue to support the brewery, while calling others “haters”. I find this behavior a little odd but not surprising. Like, they don’t see ANY issue with what was going on? Months and months of slushy releases that were misrepresented.