Why rate infected beers?

I spend as little time as possible worrying and how people review their beers. I am not going to agree with everyone, in fact when it comes to reviews I may agree with only a small portion of people. I read the reviews that are helpful to me and bypass the rest.

I review should be a critical, but fair, critique of the beer you are drinking. It should accurately describe the drinking experience, it should be done in such a way that others can live vicariously through your review. If you came across an infected beer than there is no reason not to honestly and fairly critique that infected beer. Even a bad review (low score not poorly written) or a review of a bad beer can be helpful to others. I may sound like a broken record but it is all about being fair in the assessment.

 

Hey brother, too bad you had an infected Big Gruesome, that beer was knock-me-on-my-butt amazing. But you probably already knew that. If you want to encourage the brewer to relocate to Minnesota, I'd consider that a personal favor.

I agree that I don't worry about how other people review beers. But I review infected beers & hope others do as well, because it alerts me (& others) to a potential problem with a beer. Example: I've traded for a couple of beers that sounded good before checking the reviews & found out after I received them that 50% or more of the reviews mention an infection. Bad on me for not checking, but if I had, I wouldn't have bothered, because if the brewery is having that many quality issues with a brew, I don't want to waste time or money chasing it down.

Without written reviews on infected beers, it would be really difficult to know what problems might be out there in the wild.

 

So, a brewery should only be judged by their successes, not their failures? If a beer is infected, it's the fault of the brewery. It may not be what they brewer intended, but it sure is what the consumer wound up with.

When Consumers Reports is rating products and finds a lemon, should they keep going back to the store until they find a good unit to test?

 

I agree with this. I think a lot of people use this site to look at reviews and don't track every "Beer X is infected" thread. I think reviewing an infected beer is fine; that was your experience drinking the beer. If I see a certain beer with many "infected" reviews, I may not want to pick that beer up. Similiarily, if I see a beer with a high rating but the reviews for the last year or two haven't been great and a lot of people think it is past its prime, I may pass on it.

Just because it is not the way a brewer intended it doesn't mean you should give them a free pass and not review it. If a 10 year old retired beer was great fresh but you had it 10 years later and it was a shell of its former self, I think saying that in a review is helpful, like I think warning people of infected beers is.

I always try and put batch numbers, bottle numbers, vintages, bottled on dates, consumed dates, etc. in my reviews to give people a sense. If I come across an infected beer I review it, but if I can get another uninfected bottle I certainly re-review them and re-access it and edit my reviews.

 

This idea about only reviewing "what the brewer intended" always baffles me. I'm sure craft brewers don't typically set out to make a bad/underwhelming beer, but we all know they exist, often because something about the ingredient profile doesn't work or due to production/brewing issues. Should we only review the hypothetical beer that the brewer hoped to create when he initially crafted the recipe? If a beer doesn't condition well or carbonate in the bottle, should we review it as if it had (the brewer certainly didn't intend the beer to be flat after all)? I apply the same thinking to infected beers, you are entitled to review the beer the brewery chose to sell consumers.

 

I don't think it's about what the brewer 'intended', rather a lot of times they do in fact make a good beer but 1 just so happened to be bad. I got a bad bottle of Saison Dupont once that smelled up my whole house and was completely undrinkable. Does that mean I should review it and give it all 1's saying it's the worst beer ever made and nobody should ever waste a dime on it? Never got a bad bottle of pbr so I guess that must be a better beer.

 

I'm going to have to jump on the bandwagon here and say that not reviewing a beer that was infected or otherwise not how it was intended would be doing the brewery AND consumers an injustice. A beer is not judged on taste alone; quality and consistency should just as well be taken into account. Consumers should be able to make an informed decision, and just ignoring problems by not reviewing them doesn't do anything to inform the consumer. I have to imagine that the first time you go into a beer expecting perfection, and you get an infected, almost undrinkable beer, you'd be pissed you didn't know that was a possibility ahead of time.

 

I was referring the the OP and the many others who do in fact say, you should not review a beer if it isn't what the brewer intended.

And in reference to your point about Saison Dupont versus PBR, while a single person is not a representative sample, if in fact there are fewer bad bottles of PBR relative to Saison Dupont, it does suggest something about quality control, which is an important point of consideration.

The way I see it, as individual reviewers, we are not evaluating the totality of a batch with each review we upload. We simply review a single bottle. It is the aggregation of each single bottle review posted that creates a composite score which provides an overall indication of a certain beers quality. Therefore, I think it crucial that we "take the good with the bad" so to speak.

 

And I agree with the OP in that I don't believe infected bottles should be reviewed. When I go into a store I always know there is a chance I could walk out with a bad bottle; don't need a review to tell me that. I'd rather a review tell me about the beer to see if I might like it. Telling me you got a bad bottle and giving it an F doesn't help. If I have the same beer 10 times and I love it but get 1 bad bottle I don't all of a sudden think the beer is awful.

 

I find this belief that brewers intent should ever be taken into account a bit ubsurd. What one intends, does not always reflect in a performance. If a brewers intention of a beer (presumably to produce a good, consistent, quality product), comes through, then kudos to them. If, on the other hand, their beer was supposed to be hoppy, crisp and refreshing, but they fail to invest in a dating system, and I try their beer at 8 months and the hoppiness I'm expected to taste isn't there, then the beer will be judged accordingly. My reviews are about my reflections of a beer, not the brewers feelings. And if their beer is f**ked because of poor quality control, my feelings are, "get a better hold of your QC, because this is shite."

That's not to say a beer tried once will not be reviewed again, but hey, first impressions are important. I've had beers that were great, and then QC got in the way and now I do not care to invest in the product (see: Angel's Share). I've also had beers I didn't enjoy, then took some time off, and returned and enjoyed them much more (see: Deschutes Dissident).

 

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As I read the "what the brewer intended," and gain more experience with reviewing I have chosen to intepret that as meaning judging the beer for itself in relationship to "keep the style" in mind and on any gaps between what the brewer said the beer was to be and what I find it to be.

So if I buy a beer because the brewer says it is a maibock and I decide to try it, I'm not going to knock the beer or knock off points if it doesn't have a strong citrusy hop bitterness that curls my hair. A Maibock is intended to have lots of malt character dominating the beer. If it doesn't then....

So when it comes to an infected beer, if the brewer identifies the beer as a style which is intended to be sour because of spontaneous fermentation, then certain kinds of "infection" are what I expect to taste. If however I'm told it’s a dopplebock and the beer is sour as hell, I'm going to complain about it because that isn't supposed to be there and it is the brewery's falt. So you and I are in agreement about reviewing infected beers. Similarly, when it comes to flat beers what the brewer intended was a bottle carbonated beer and it wasn't, so I knock of points and criticize the beer because what the brewer intended and what s/he delivered are two different things.

 

Why do some brewers bottle & sell infected beers? Even if the problem develops after bottling, some brewers won't acknowledge the problem or offer to make it right. If the brewer makes the effort to get a uninfected bottle in the hands of the reviewer as compensation for the infected bottle, then I think replacing the review of the infected beer should be expected. Otherwise, it's fair game.

 

I sure as hell would write that very negative review until I was given a reason not to. If it happened once to me it could happen in another bottle. Why not let people know that when you buy this beer there is a chance that you will end up with something that bad?

Unless the consumer or distributor is at fault for the condition of the beer (i.e. you drank your IPA 6 months after it was brewed or let it sit out in the sun or something like that) it should be fairly evaluated. If it is horrible so be it. I sort of think of ratings as an "expected value" of the beer. If there is a probability, no matter how low, that a beer will be a 1, then that should be known.

 

If I did find an infected beer i'd still try it...but would also get another bottle of the same beer and try again then review it if later on
If I need to change my review...I never like putting down brewerys as bad batch...but being honest I find is better. And helps everybody..that's why I try everything.

 

If the issue with the bottle happened on the brewer's end (infection, old bottle due to lack of dating, etc), I'll review it because I didn't know anything was wrong with it going in. If the issue is on the retailer's end (skunking, old bottle, etc), I'll review it only if the beer doesn't taste like a shell of itself (three month old IPA....yeah, the hops are faded, but you at least know what's going on there. Year-old? No chance in hell you're getting much of anything out of that).

 

But as I pointed out in another post, the brewer did not intend for me to drink an infected beer so there is a big gap between what the brewer intended and what s/he delivered. Therefore the brewer should be amply criticized for that gap because as others have pointed out infection occurs at the brewery and creates a discrepancy between what I drank and what the brewer intended. So by dinging the points I am rating what the brewer intended.

 

If a person can't bring him or herself to post a negative review on a blatantly poor (infected) product then perhaps that person shouldn't be reviewing.

 

I am one of the people who reviewed an infected Big Gruesome. I'm going to give an honest review of a beer whether or not it tasted as intended. If a certain percentage of the bottles are infected, that percentage of the reviews should show that. If I had seen a large percentage of reviews showing infection, I wouldn't have traded for the bottle.

 

Because they bottled it and you paid for it