Should a change in recipe be pro-actively acknowledged?

Beers are, at the end of the day, consumer products. Consumer products are constantly changing because there are a lot of variables that go into it. Sometimes recipes need to be modified because the back end of the business changes; a certain hop variety becomes too expensive or unavailable, distribution widens and the product needs to be more shelf-stable, packaging changes, etc. Sometimes recipes are modified because consumer tastes change. Upon entry to the market, Boston Lager, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Anchor Steam, these were considered HOPPY beers. Nowadays, tastes have changed. It would be completely reasonable for these companies to increase their hopping rates accordingly (not that they have, I'm just making an example). This is just the nature of business.

A company should not have to advertise recipe changes. If the changes are for the consumers benefits, they might want to for the marketing hype, but if its a change that was necessitated by industry issues, they shouldn't be required to disclose that information. I think a lot of these changes are extremely minor and incremental, so much so that consumers generally won't notice the difference. However, if you point it out and say "Hey, we tried a new type of hop because Cascades were too expensive," you instantly get an army of easy-chair experts who have decided the beer is now shit and everyone "sold out" before it even hits their lips, and those impressions translate directly to their drinking experience and cause them to taste and smell largely fictitious, often negative differences because they know to look for it.

 

Often recipes change in an attempt to keep the flavor profile the same.

 

You just Hemingwayed my Dickens. Well put.

 

During the hop shortage, Saaz was in short supply even if you had a contract. A Michigan brewery reformulated their best selling beer's hop bill to make up for that. Make less beer, or reformulate? What would you do? They tried to make the beer the same in flavor.

 

This is also why some Vintages are better than others! For instance a 2010 Abyss could better than a 2009 regardless of aging!

 

That's particularly the case with BIG beers. Yeast is a living thing, so naturally you could only predict it's behavior within a certain margin of error. That margin grows substantially as the beer increases in strength, because the yeast are working much harder. It's more difficult to calculate how quickly or slowly the yeast will ferment, how much of the sugar they'll consumer, how much heat they'll generate during fermentation, etc. It's way super high gravity beers like 120-Minute IPA could be massively different from batch to batch.

 

I can se it now NEW IPPROVED BUDWISER LESS BODY LESS HOPS

 

Aka "Bud Light" and "Bud Select 55" aren't they?

 

yes, they should let the people know

 

It seems to me that breweries that offer more than one regular IPA (to use that style as an example but not meaning a RyePA or a DIPA as being the difference) that the brewer may be trying to improve on their current regular IPA (which is not a big seller) with a radical change in the recipe ingredients in the hopes of finding a combination that will be more accepted by the clientele. The new IPA that take off in sales may then become the standard offering for that brewery and the old one phased out. If you are one of the few who liked the old one, then you're out of luck, like it or not. It's a business and they have to make a profit.

Minor tweaks of a recipe are something that we just have to live with.

 

As long as the taste is the same, or pretty damn close, who the hell cares.

 

One thing that I have not seen mentioned yet as I read through this thread is that the brewing process, techniques, and equipment can matter just as much as a recipe. If you make the exact same recipe on two different systems you will often end up with two different products. Often a brewery will have to change a recipe when they are installing a new brew house or using a new piece of equipment to make sure that the results are the same (or as close as they can get).