Goose Island Bourbon County 2019

Gladly would take more vanilla. Any help?

 

They taste nothing like oysters. And I'm not sure if the allergy risk but that might be a real concern

 

Just to clarify one point, you use the words, “making allowances” and seem to have inferred that I’m defending them as BEST, but neither is actually my motivation in trying to sort things out for myself here, instead think “alternative explanations.” Just as part of your professional life seems to be bound up with barrels, part of my professional life is bound up with understanding and preventing failures at both an individual and organizational level. Part of what I have learned from the pros is that in many very complex situations what seems to be “human error” is actually the result of something built into the complexity of the system and constitutes what one author has called “The Revenge of Unintended Consequences” i.e., the result of all several different apparently reasonable decisions and procedures all coming together in an unplanned unexpected way. (For one big example consider Three Mile Island, a failure that was supposed to have a probability of less than 1 in a billion.) Such things even happen when there has been a lot of systems thinking involved. So my starting point is deciding wither the system failed rather than the people in the system.

A different explanation for coffee? No, as I pointed out lots of barrel aging programs wind up having to dump part of what they brewed and then go on to release the rest successfully. So for me a part of the batch being dumped is a red flag which looks bigger and redder after the fact given how often it has happened in barrel aging programs that some percentage has been dumped and the rest released without problems developing later as the result of that bug nobody thought was dangerous. Furthermore even if they had dumped the rest of the Coffee batch that wasn’t the only variant that show infection and that wouldn't have prevented the big problems they had.

Anyway, for example, one of the things that is lacking here is an overall timeline and that could be critical. The Chicago Tribune reporter whose post you link to indicated his tasting took place six weeks before Black Friday. I doubt that tasting took place before bottling, but we don’t know for sure. More importantly do we know for certain that that variant had not already shipped before that tasting? Six weeks is not a very long time when you have to have the beer in the hands of all retailers in the US before a certain date. So as you have pointed out Black Friday probably contributed to the problem. As for a single release day, what is the alternative? Shipping takes time. As soon as some from the first delivery in state X is sold the word will hit social media and then all the retailers in all the US states, who may not even know yet when their shipment will arrive, will start having the phones go wild with calls from potential customers. Sure the Black Friday event creates excitement, but of a very different kind than that first sighting without a Black Friday and is something that saves many of your retailers from having a another BIG headache. (BTW what your underline seems to indicate is that GI was being more cautious than in the past and so far as we know it is now more cautious than barrel aging programs in general have been in the past. That is a good sign, but I doubt that at this stage that level of caution is the norm for barrel aging programs in general.)

 

Same as previous... Gladly take help on vanilla

 

Why would they brew a stout that people could potentially be allergic to? That would seriously cut into their market potentially costing them money. I don't see a mega corporation interested in that prospect. I don't buy into that beer at all, not even on a tap-only level.

 

No question BCBS is way more dark fruit tasting than it was pre-2015. I still enjoy it but it was a far better beer then. Now it’s closer to a Black Tuesday, cloyingly sweet, relatively thin, and with prominent raisin notes.

 

don't buy it. Matter of fact, what's the purpose of following a BCBS thread and expending the energy to complain about it?

I haven't really read that over and over again. I think the same people bringing up 2015 like a broken record are instigating this boring discussion that has nothing new to offer.

What's any of that got to do with you, me, the thread or anything else? You're acting like we're the board of directors here. No one here is working there and if you think they're not trying to avoid putting bad tasting beer into a bottle then lulz.

This discussion was over 2-3 years ago good lord if you want to have it again just re-read the past threads.

 

Well I learned something new this year and from something you said that makes a great deal of sense. So thanks again for that.

 

On the other hand...beer reps aren't held to the same standard as lab techs so I'm taking it with a grain of salt as should you.

I think the further away we get from 2015 the less clarity we'll have on the subject, outside of the fairly openly delivered information they provided when they felt comfortable disseminating what they discovered to the public.

 

Jeez, t took forever to find some actual numbers.
About 4% of the population has a food allergy of some sort with the majority of those being Asians and women (https://www.webmd.com/allergies/new...rcent-of-americans-suffer-from-food-allergies).

(https://draxe.com/shellfish-allergy/)
Using the max of 2.5% of the population, minus the 13 states GI doesn't distribute to, subtracting people under 21, and subtracting people who don't drink stouts.
It doesn't look like they'll take much of an economic hit by releasing an oyster stout.

 

I did buy it and have for many years, just less and less every year. Just because my opinion may not be the most positive one does not mean I shouldn't express it.

 

Ummm how many people are allergic/intolerant to gluten?

 

A quick Google search says 1%. But even in that one percent more then half say they can tolerate gluten. Compared to 2.5% for shellfish.

 

Oh dear, someone can dish it out but can't take it.

Serious question: if you get that I'm "whiteknighting" GI from this post, doesn't it actually say more about your clear obsessive hate for GI and your resulting need to ALWAYS respond to every person in this thread right here who you suspect might like them?

I'll hang up and listen, thanks for taking my call.

 

Bourbon County officially jumped the shark in 2018. A rapidly diminishing product for years, last years releases were embarrassing.Bramble rye the final nail in the coffin of bourbon county for me. Regular bcbs still holds up, but $30 for a shoddily made variant when I can go to Finback, Other Half etc and get a much better barrel aged stout for $18 just doesn’t make sense. $70 for a rare in 2015 was the biggest mugging I’ve ever fell victim to.There are still variants sitting on shelves on Long Island as I type this, seems plenty of other people notice the decline in quality too.

 

Thanks for the warning, and I agree with you clarity will disappear in the background noise for most people. But not to worry I always consider the source of information in evaluating it and how it might have gotten distorted over time or though the "grapevine." (We used to play a game called "Chinese Whispers" or "Telephone" or "Whisper down the lane" when I was a kid. )

 

Finback!?!

Other Half, maybe...sometimes, comes close. The rest of the time they fall extremely short.

 

I don't think they are actually an allergy risk. Typically an oyster stout is brewed with the brine from oysters. I don't know how shellfish allergy works but as others have pointed out it is not a common allergy. It's a fairly common style and I've enjoyed all the examples I've had. The best for me was actually a chocolate oyster stout, just to make it a little weirder

 

They don’t taste like oysters or fishy at all. Just a slight saltiness.