Something wrong with Furious Cans?

Because street cred is where it's at these days, apparently...

 

ISO "Flat" or "Off" tasting Abrasive and Furious. All your infected beer belong to us.

 

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the 'infection' at Hopkins Tavern was in the lines, and not in the keg itself. Hopkins Tavern was never the cleanest place the couple of times I stopped in.

 

First thing that I thought, as well, but I have tasted enough line issues from lines pulling flavors from the previous beer when a bar doesn't at least rinse between kegs of different beers all the way to the Goose Island IPA I just had at the St. Louis Park American Legion, which had a taste from sitting in the same line for probably weeks since the last person ordered a GI IPA at the American Legion. But I don't see how a line, no matter how long it had been since it was clean, could ever give a flavor that close to an infected beer. We are talking real tart cherry that I got from it. In most cases, I would have said it was just an issue at HT, but in this particular case, I am 99% sure this one goes back to Surly,

 

If you don't clean out the lines you can absolutely get an infection in the line. Especially if they'd previously run an infected beer through the line since the last cleaning. It'd be tough to get something that tasted really infected though since the time spent in contact with the hypothetical infection in the line isn't very long (especially for a beer like Furious which probably gets poured at least every hour, even at a place that doesn't serve much Furious).

 

So, improperly sealed cans leaking co2 into the open air, exposing the beer to microorganisms in the wild: Sounds like an infection to me, just brought on by external forces.

Or would you prefer to call it "spoiled"?

 

If you want some Eight, I'll trade you for scotch. At least that won't be infected.

 

Hopkins Tavern was the Mecca of filthy taplines.

 

I think that they used to have that as the banner that hung over the back entrance.

 

Actually it was right above the meat wheel.

 

Long time fan of Surly Furious. It's my favorite beer that I drink on a regular basis. I too got a 4 pack of the cans dated 1/28/2015 from a local liquor store in MN. Horrible flavor. if you pour it in to a glass next to a furious from a different canning date you see the exact same color but 1/28/2015 is very cloudy. It wont settle the sediments for hours. Any other date is clear.

I live in MN so I contacted Surly. We arranged a time to meet at the new Minneapolis brewery so I could give them the rest of the bad 4 pack. They were considerate but seemed pretty dismissive about it... I was disappointed. It appeared to be unfiltered but I was told they don't filter, they centrifuge. So I got no real answers but for sure there was a bad batch that has a canning date of 1/28/2015.

Here is a picture of the two for comparison.

 

That seems like their standard response - See: infected Eight, undercarbed Abrasive.

 

From what you are describing, I'm guessing that you had a beer that suffered from Oxidation and not an infection.

 

Does that mean that the air wasn't properly purged from the can and not detected during filling?

 

All package beer oxidizes at some point. The cans could have been warm stored and oxidized quicker than normal. It could have been a packaging issue. At Summit, we figure that our beer oxidizes twice as fast when stored warm.

Here is some more info. Try the experiment at the end of this article and you will come away with a pretty good idea of how oxidation can affect beer. http://www.professorbeer.com/articles/oxidative_staling_beer.html

 

^ its kind of cool to see a 'competing' brewery come in and support another that is in the same market.

 

I had a four pack of Furious dated 1/28/15 and they were fine.

 

Thanks, interesting link. Of course I overlooked the most obvious explanation while focusing on Surly's canning line startup problem.

In my defense, I think I left my Occam's Razor in the hotel room on my last trip.