Infected beer

No debate. If neither side knew, & there hadn't been any reliable reports, it's not something the traders should even discuss.

I've probably received 20-25 infected bottles over a ten year plus trading career. It happens & it sucks. Just move along.

 

Depends on the situation. I received an infected 2016 BA Monsters Park from Mldeen Times from a regular trade partner. I messaged him and he said they were offering refunds for the empties. So we set up another trade so I could send the empty back to him. And then we set up a 3rd trade a few months later where he added a replacement bottle.

If the brewery is offering refunds for the empty physical bottle, this is the right way to go imo

 

Look to the brewer, not the trader. Infected beer is a brewery issue so it's their responsibility to make things right.

 

I am in the middle between "No responsibility on sender" and "Come to an amicable solution." The sender truly has no responsibility, but I look at every trade as a potential trading partner, and I'd like to help "make it right" if I can. If that's as simple as tossing in a nice extra on our next trade - then absolutely. However, if the other party feels the only way to make it right is for me to send a replacement bottle, then no. I'm happy to help replace it in a new trade, but I don't want to eat separate shipping costs for something that I never knew about.

I suppose the degree of the bottle is another issue. I just recently (1-1.5 months ago?) learned about the breadth of the JO bottle infections. A friend indicated that he had an off-bottle awhile back, and I told him that he should speak with the brewery. I saw that a couple people with the same bottles had issues, but due to choosing to not follow the JO thread, and not living in Ohio, I didn't realize how wide-spread it was until I recently went back and read about it. I traded for a number of the bottles on the list, and traded/gave away 2 bottles that are affected. Prior to learning this. I don't expect the person I received them from to do anything about it, nor do I believe so far ex post that I should be doing anything about it. However, if they asked me to, I would pending reasonableness.

 

Im in the new owner eats it camp. If i traded and found out later my bottle i shipped was infected i would probably send them a little something. I would not be happy tho if someone contacted me 6 months from now that a beer was infected and wanted it made right. When i trade i expect if therr was no problem in first couple days then the trade is done. Do your research on the beer you want before a trade

 

risk of the trade game


only issue i can see if someone sends infected beer and doesn’t disclose it

 

Definitely depends on the situation. It's different when a trader PURPOSELY is trying to unload infected beers before...most people get wind of it.

I've seen it a bunch over the last year or so. On every trading platform, including BA. The last big ticket item I remember was Medianoche Reserve.

I opened up my bottle of Monday '18 last week. Unfortunately, it was infected. I contacted cycle, and are planning on refunding.

 

It was pretty gross to see out of no where a flood of Medianoche Reserve FT offers. Only to very quickly realize that something was up. Not sure if anyone got burned, but I know a whole group of people started posting on FT offers saying "FYI, brewery just released notice that this is infected."

Sad when people do this.

 

I think the question here is fairly easy to answer. The hardest issue is the responsibility of trader shipping an infected beer that they didn't know was infected (or claimed not to know), but should have known based on publicly available information. And if there is publicly available information, does the recipient have as much of a duty to look into these things? Who should bear the risk when infection is already publicly disclosed? And what happens if its just 2 reports on untappd (not hundreds).

 

I'd say there's 3 situations.

If a trade is made AFTER an announcement by the brewery, the sender should make it right since they should have known better. A lot of the beer I trade for are from places I do not follow on social media so as a recipient, I may not have known to ask or look. The sender is presumably someone who bought the beer though and would likely know and follow the brewery online.

If it's done before an announcement though, then it's more grey. It's not the senders fault in that case since they likely didn't know. Maybe the sender could help the recipient work out the trade in or whatever the brewery was doing to rectify the problem.

If something is just randomly infected though (no mass reporting or announcement), the recipient should just eat it. It's happened to me before. It's annoying but I didn't bother telling the sender since how would they know and it wasn't their fault. The sender has no way to verify the truth of this claim too.

 

I understand that you did not say this in such a way that you mean this 100% of the time, but I feel like this is just a bit too inclusive. If you didn't get a member beer, there's no reason you should know absolutely that a beer is infected after your purchase.

 

My $.02, since I had three trades going when this happened: two had been shipped (one had not received my end yet) and one was scheduled to ship from both of us the next day.

The one what was not yet shipped we just cancelled with no hard feelings.

The other two, I offered to send them the money I would be refunded for the infected bottles they were getting in trade. In addition, I offered to pay the MSRP on the beers that they traded to me (100 percent for one, 50 percent for the other, each added up to about the same total) and told them to keep the AB Noirs (which were also part of the trade.)

 

I received a 2017 BA Oro Negro awhile back and contacted the trader after learning about the infection. He hooked me up and swapped it with a 2016 and took the 2017 to redeem at the brewery. He definitely went out of his way on that one when he didn't have any obligation to do so.