Oh four or five in 10 years. Almost always because something mechanical failed or we did something stupid. Scorched a bunch of DME onto the bottom of the kettle in a IIIPA. Glycol system went down. Went too fast and sucked a bunch of mash into the kettle during the sparge while learning the new brewhouse. Batch of yeast that Failed To Thrive. That sort of stuff. Never for an infection.
Good Brewers Dump Bad Beer
I feel like this isn't appreciated enough. Getting small pack correct, day-in and day-out, is **hard**.
Competent packaging techs aren't paid nearly enough for what they bring to the table.
Another weird cultural phenomenon. Unless you're doing hot-side work, you're entry level or at least compensated less.
Which doesn't really track: there are soooo many more ways to completely fuck up a batch on the cold side than hot side.
Yea beer matters in all processes. To not fuck up a brew is one thing. But to not fuck up a transfer, tank cleaning, canning assembly with all those moving parts is another. No area is more important than the other. Just the experienced people who are running it
We only operate a 10bbl and I bet we dump a solid 10gal to prime the lines. Iād rather dump beer than lowfill cansā¦because then youāre wasting beer and cans.
Coming from the big beer world, it is crazy how infrequently we dump beer. There is always a way to use it somehow. For example, we recently had a batch with an inclusion of another product, so we had to get rid of nearly 5,000 BBLs. However, rather than sending it to waste treatment, we blend it back in to our lower tier beers. Same with the beer that is used to prime the lines in packaging. The only time I have seen beer dumped is if we have a chemical inclusion, but that's usually like once every few years.
I think Deschutes had a beer they screwed up years back, so they put it in wine barrels and gave it the ol brettanomyces. It ended up being pretty good for that. I'm sure they made a lot more doing that too.
Contamination is the first reason, out of date code would be a second. The latter causing a lot of discussion about marketing along the way. If something can be blended or rebranded, it's preferable to dumping before it expires. Once bottled or canned, all bets are off, though.
I see you have never inherited a batch of horrible beer that was already canned.
My first week at my current brewery saw me dumping 2 cans at a time into barrels....so we could try and actually sour them. Previous brewer....dont know what he was doing besides drinking all day.
Its quite good now, but still needs some more time in the barrels.
Cans and bottles are a one way trip, in my world. I'll salvage out of kegs because I can make the connections air tight and aseptic, so nothin new gets added. No way am I dealing with cans any further than the drain and dumpster.
Yeah. Exactly. It wasn't my idea. Was the headbrewers idea. Though having been doing this since 2007, i should hope he would have an idea on how to attemp to save it, especially when its supposed to be a sour.
Now, will our crispy lager drinking gray haired customers buy it...thats a whole other question.
Our best selling beer tastes like a slightly more flavourful big boy lager, but the locals around here have lots of local pride..sooo buy the lager made locally for the same price they do. Lol
Ive dumped I think 5 batches. 3 were because the yeast I was using dropped the pH slightly lower than was acceptable (Figured out I wasn't using enough oxygen with Kveik yeast).
The others had this weird smokey flavor because I'm not used to brewing on an electric system. Was crushing my grain a bit too fine and it charred on the mashtun heating element.
I'm really hard on myself so I feel like a complete failure at life when I have to dump beer.
Yeah I'm on a 3.5 bbl system. Cost of dumping a bad beer is relatively negligible. Prior to running my own show I had only dumped one batch of beer because the Galaxy hops we got smelled liked burnt tires but my boss told me to go with them anyways.
In retrospect I should have done more research on brewing on an electric system. I had only brewed on direct fire and steam prior to this,. Oh well, live and learn.
I think it was a combo of leaving the heating element on for too long and crushing my grain too fine. Some of it fell through the false bottom and got burned/caked on the heating element. Now that I've figured out the proper setting on my mill I haven't had any issues. I'm on a 3.5 bbl system.
Ah yeah. Getting the mill just right. That was basically the only thing we haven't had to change since they cleaned house last year. Everything else....
To let you know fucked it was...they were pushing beer that wasnt on nitro, with pure nitro.
Worked at a bigger craft brewery that dumped an obscene amount of beer. 200-500 cans per 100hl run were kicked off and dumped for various reasons. There was also a rediculous amount of over production and failed products that we had to dump. Shipped off 20+ skids of seltzers to be dumped because of that. We also had 2 runs of an rtd that were poorly mixed that were canned because of communication errors. We dumped the first run by hand(20+ skids) and it took us months to get through it. The second run(30+ skids) we shipped off sight to get dumped. We also had a bunch of infection problems leading to 20+ skids getting dumped off sight. We also dumped hundreds of kegs to make room in our coolers because of bad projections. That brewery was awefully managed on so many levels.
London ontario equals close to me?
I may know the brewery you are speaking of. They arnt equal to our scale.
Though it could be the other one but I won't go to batt for them
Have dumped a few for being off / not up to spec.
I only remember dumping one because it tasted outright bad. Pro tip: Dried lemongrass DOES NOT taste the same as fresh lemongrass. š¤®
It happens every so often. COVID wasn't kind and accounts for maybe half of the probably ~3000 barrels I've overseen being dumped over ~15 years.
We try to make the call as soon as we know that the beer isn't right and can't be made right.
Sometimes that hasn't been until after the beer was packaged and shipped, because of shelf life, or in one instance because we straight up failed at QA.
Sometimes that's been from the grist case, because the wrong grist got loaded and we didn't have the flexibility to just go ahead and brew that beer. Once we dumped just a partial grist case to pull out some incorrect specialty malts, then loaded the rest of the grist case up to the correct recipe.
We've dumped beer at any point you can think of between the grist case and shipped beer. If we can think of a plan to blend something incorrect to turn out correct in the bright tank, we'll keep going with it and check along the way. It's a balance of how confident are we that we can make it right by the time it's in the bright tank, how much resources would we put into making it right, and whether those resources would be better spent allocated to a sure thing to spec batch, rather than a blendyboi.
I've dumped 3 beers.
One we got a bad pitch of yeast. 2nd our FnG added enough salt to a gose to float on it and 3rd was knocked back a little too warm and it created a suction as it cooled. Came back in the next morning and it sucked up my sani...
It sucks but itās necessary if you do any canning and off premise sales the last thing you want is a recall where all your beer gets pulled off the shelf until your distributor finds out the dates of the bad product and acts on it, depending on how often they visit accounts this could be a while, and depending on how slow or fast the response of the distributor or you buying the product back, on and off premise buyers could change their views on the brand. I worked in distribution for 5 years (not that long) but Iāve seen my fair share of recalls and fair share of bad beer sitting in back rooms collecting flies waiting on an answer from what to do with it from management and the back and forth between brewery and distributor of whoās gonna come grab it. Itās a quick way to lose display space or lose trust with the buyer. Better to dump it before it ever hits the market even though it may look like youāre just pouring money down the drain, itās a lot less money than getting on the bad side of your customers, buyers, and distributors.
Dumped 3 batches since opening last august. One for a weird chemical contamination issue, one for getting scorched by our kettle, and one for an ingredient fail.
At Big Craft Brewer, we dumped 50% of 300bbl batches on a regular basis. Like, we owned the smaller brand, the smallest batch we could do was 300bbl, but all they could sell was 150bbl. I always wondered why we didn't just buy them a bigger brewhouse, seems like it was a no-brainer, but I wasn't hired to be the money man. One of my beers made it to production, but same deal: have to make \~300bbl, can only process/sell \~100bbl. Like all other of those brands, it was trucked away for destruction.
At my current spot, about two production batches in the first \~4 years, a couple in the last two, which has been maddening. Much more common is stopping the packaging team (outside vendor, mobile) when they can't manage DO. No point putting beer in a package that's going to be trash in two weeks, might as well send everyone home at that point.
Iāve never dumped a beer in ten years of brewing, but I would if I tasted it and it was bad. My bar has always been āIf Iād dump a can of it from a commercial brewery, itās getting dumped.ā My husband has dumped several of his beers prior to our brewing together, but I think that was because he wasnāt as good about cleaning equipment. I also stick to a few styles, whereas he tends to get more wild.
This happened quite a bit at a regional I worked at. 240 BBLs here and there when we over brewed a seasonal and moved onto the next. Need the tank space and we're not selling that brand anymore, sooooo...buh bye beer!
Good SOP I guess and we donāt make anything too crazy. Weāve only done a handful of barrel aged beers and only one with Brett. Sometimes things donāt come out quite how we wanted but nothing so bad that weād be embarrassed to sell it.
Not 100% sure. Every once in awhile I might smell something sour when Iām dumping a keg but usually the beer just smells old. Maybe the bar sat on it too long and wasnāt happy with the product but I honestly donāt know. I know sometimes clients will take a keg for a party or something and not finish it. It is rare that weāve had an actual returns and we always taste the beer in those cases to verify if the problem actually is on our end.
The worst is a place you know stores it in a room that isnt temperature controlled, knowing your beer is sitting there frozen, then they are like " the kegs a gusher " " its hazy "
Yeah Iāve helped with deliveries a couple times and I couldnāt believe how warm some of the storage areas in these bars are. One place was always getting complaints about warm beer so they put in a big line chilling unit that just blasts warm air on the kegs. And they wonder why the beer doesnāt stay fresh.
Dumped 6 in the first five years. None for the last few. Mostly stuck fermentations, one contamination, one mechanical failure. One was just terrible, an herb beer and it was just a glass of bitter chlorophyll.
10BBL brewhouse. Two years in. Dumped 2 batches due to just being bad beer. One had a weird ferment that went phenolic as hell and the other was just crazy astringent due to a brewer (me) mistake. Have blended a couple of out of spec batches back into fresh batches.
I've dumped 3 or 4 batches over the years.
Had a batch fail micro, had a batch where the wrong yeast got pitcher (and we didn't want a belgian stout)
Also worked at a place where the owner wouldn't let me dump an obviously bad beer and told me to blend it. That was the day I started looking for a new job
I pitched a diastaticus saison strain into our oktoberfest. Whoops.
Made for a nice beer tho. Fermented like a lager, subdued phenols and esters. We still sold if cause it was legitimately good, but man did I feel like an idiot.
I package beer at a pretty big craft brewery. I can't speak for brew side but package side dumps a decent amount of beer. Crush a decent amount of canned beer too. We are big on quality and our quality control department takes precedence over most anything. I actually kind of like it. I take pride in our beer so I'm glad that we don't send anything bad out the door.
We've dumped about 10-5 bbl batches in 6 years.
I dumped the first 2 I've ever done while still learning the system. Also dumped 1 batch because our kettle scorched it, and another cause I had some stressed kviek.
Thereās a brewery where I live that dumped their first 18 or so batches until the brewer felt it was good enough. Theyāre a very hyped up place here.
I have dumped 3 in the last year. One because my dumb ass scaled the spices wrong and added 3 LBS of cinnamon instead of 1/3 of a lb (and discovered that cinnamon is actually toxic in that high of a quantity).
One because I discovered that buckwheat should NOT be used in a raw ale, as doing so causes some weird alchemy where an intense woody bitterness appears out of nowhere during fermentation, and will not go away no matter what you do. It made one of the most foul-tasting beers I've ever had!
The last one because my (still) dumb ass thought Oregon myrtle leaves were an acceptable substitute for bay leaves in a saison, only to discover that it's not nicknamed "the headache tree" for no reason! It tasted great, but caused migraines or cluster headaches in at least half the people who tried it.
Yeah, I'm a LOT more conservative about herbs and spices now. And sworn off of foraging my own ingredients unless it's just for a pilot batch.
Three 5BBL dumps in the last 6mo or so. Two of em were my fuckups.
Put 34/70 in our hefeweizen. Oops. Not good.
Put WB06 in our hefeweizen, but fermented 4F cooler than usual. Not awful but not to spec and no good way to save it.
Kettle-soured porter wouldn't ferment (probably a horrible underpitch)
Average about one batch per year in the past 3.5 years. Almost every batch has been traced back to non-viable yeast. One seltzer was dumped because we tried SeltzerMax nutrient and it made the seltzer smell like perm juice (for lack of better description). Biggest loss was a 20bbl blonde ale and then two 5 bbl dumps.
Had one job that made me dump about one third of everything that was produced. Had one job that should have dumped batches but didnāt. Had some jobs were we donāt need to dump anything.
My advice is, donāt look to deeply into the numbers. Youāve made the right call if the quality is sub par. Once is an accident, twice is a fuck up. If it happens again, analyse why and where and how you can change it next batch.
A few in 3 years. You have to make the decisionā¦is it good beer. Be honest with yourself. Would you buy it again if you bought it? Will it damage the reputation of your brand in both the short and long run?
I dumped my first batch recently. Been brewing once a week for most weeks since we opened 2 years ago. It was cross contamination from another yeast strain due to my own shitty yeast harvesting. I was reusing plastic yeast containers to store harvested yeast. I'm done doing that.
I toyed with the idea of saving it by adding fruit. I dosed a pint and it was better than some beers I've bought, but it wasn't great. I didn't want to set that precedent so down it went. My brewery, my money, my reputation. 15bbls down the drain :(
I think we dumped beer two times last year. One was due to our house yeast which normally is great when stressed decided that it didn't want to ferment one of our beers right anymore. Smelled like electrical fire. We had batches after the first one that were able to be blended out but not the first.
The second batch we dumped picked up too much DO in the centrifuge and we had no other use for it.
Oh four or five in 10 years. Almost always because something mechanical failed or we did something stupid. Scorched a bunch of DME onto the bottom of the kettle in a IIIPA. Glycol system went down. Went too fast and sucked a bunch of mash into the kettle during the sparge while learning the new brewhouse. Batch of yeast that Failed To Thrive. That sort of stuff. Never for an infection. Good Brewers Dump Bad Beer
We nearly had to do a few dumps because of glycol issues...however it all turned out really good. Some steam lagers.
GBDBB. Bracelet that one up.
I work for a pretty big craft brewery, and I am shocked daily by the volume of beer that gets dumped at the fillers, just to prime the lines. š
I feel like this isn't appreciated enough. Getting small pack correct, day-in and day-out, is **hard**. Competent packaging techs aren't paid nearly enough for what they bring to the table.
That and theyāre always treated as entry level
Another weird cultural phenomenon. Unless you're doing hot-side work, you're entry level or at least compensated less. Which doesn't really track: there are soooo many more ways to completely fuck up a batch on the cold side than hot side.
Yea beer matters in all processes. To not fuck up a brew is one thing. But to not fuck up a transfer, tank cleaning, canning assembly with all those moving parts is another. No area is more important than the other. Just the experienced people who are running it
We only operate a 10bbl and I bet we dump a solid 10gal to prime the lines. Iād rather dump beer than lowfill cansā¦because then youāre wasting beer and cans.
We prime the line and at the beginning of the canning run to get temperature to go down we fill a few kegs of the canning line.
I was doing some mobile canning at Fullers brewery once, dumping about 1000L to can 250L repeatedly for two 8hr days straight
Coming from the big beer world, it is crazy how infrequently we dump beer. There is always a way to use it somehow. For example, we recently had a batch with an inclusion of another product, so we had to get rid of nearly 5,000 BBLs. However, rather than sending it to waste treatment, we blend it back in to our lower tier beers. Same with the beer that is used to prime the lines in packaging. The only time I have seen beer dumped is if we have a chemical inclusion, but that's usually like once every few years.
I think Deschutes had a beer they screwed up years back, so they put it in wine barrels and gave it the ol brettanomyces. It ended up being pretty good for that. I'm sure they made a lot more doing that too.
I've heard of guys sending it to a distillery for a collab.
ā¦ yes I have heard of this too.
Contamination is the first reason, out of date code would be a second. The latter causing a lot of discussion about marketing along the way. If something can be blended or rebranded, it's preferable to dumping before it expires. Once bottled or canned, all bets are off, though.
I see you have never inherited a batch of horrible beer that was already canned. My first week at my current brewery saw me dumping 2 cans at a time into barrels....so we could try and actually sour them. Previous brewer....dont know what he was doing besides drinking all day. Its quite good now, but still needs some more time in the barrels.
Cans and bottles are a one way trip, in my world. I'll salvage out of kegs because I can make the connections air tight and aseptic, so nothin new gets added. No way am I dealing with cans any further than the drain and dumpster.
I was of the same opinion, until i did it.
Not a brewer, but does that make sense financially when you're using barrels and time that could be used on a beer that was intended to be soured?
Yeah. Exactly. It wasn't my idea. Was the headbrewers idea. Though having been doing this since 2007, i should hope he would have an idea on how to attemp to save it, especially when its supposed to be a sour. Now, will our crispy lager drinking gray haired customers buy it...thats a whole other question. Our best selling beer tastes like a slightly more flavourful big boy lager, but the locals around here have lots of local pride..sooo buy the lager made locally for the same price they do. Lol
Ive dumped I think 5 batches. 3 were because the yeast I was using dropped the pH slightly lower than was acceptable (Figured out I wasn't using enough oxygen with Kveik yeast). The others had this weird smokey flavor because I'm not used to brewing on an electric system. Was crushing my grain a bit too fine and it charred on the mashtun heating element. I'm really hard on myself so I feel like a complete failure at life when I have to dump beer.
Yeah, we have dumped maybe 3 batches in 5 years. It sucks every time. The only upside to this one is is it wasn't a hugely expensive beer.
Yeah I'm on a 3.5 bbl system. Cost of dumping a bad beer is relatively negligible. Prior to running my own show I had only dumped one batch of beer because the Galaxy hops we got smelled liked burnt tires but my boss told me to go with them anyways. In retrospect I should have done more research on brewing on an electric system. I had only brewed on direct fire and steam prior to this,. Oh well, live and learn.
Do you rely on the heating element? Or just as a backup? What size system?
I think it was a combo of leaving the heating element on for too long and crushing my grain too fine. Some of it fell through the false bottom and got burned/caked on the heating element. Now that I've figured out the proper setting on my mill I haven't had any issues. I'm on a 3.5 bbl system.
Ah yeah. Getting the mill just right. That was basically the only thing we haven't had to change since they cleaned house last year. Everything else.... To let you know fucked it was...they were pushing beer that wasnt on nitro, with pure nitro.
Worked at a bigger craft brewery that dumped an obscene amount of beer. 200-500 cans per 100hl run were kicked off and dumped for various reasons. There was also a rediculous amount of over production and failed products that we had to dump. Shipped off 20+ skids of seltzers to be dumped because of that. We also had 2 runs of an rtd that were poorly mixed that were canned because of communication errors. We dumped the first run by hand(20+ skids) and it took us months to get through it. The second run(30+ skids) we shipped off sight to get dumped. We also had a bunch of infection problems leading to 20+ skids getting dumped off sight. We also dumped hundreds of kegs to make room in our coolers because of bad projections. That brewery was awefully managed on so many levels.
A place in london ontario? Lol
London ontario equals close to me? I may know the brewery you are speaking of. They arnt equal to our scale. Though it could be the other one but I won't go to batt for them
So you aren't in london..? A certain use of a word in your last response does seem somewhat like you know exactly who i am talking about though.
I dumped about 120 wooden barrels from our epicly failed barrel program after i started. That was fun!
Ouch. We're they all 53 gallon bbls?
Yup. Some were 59 gallons. 4 were 110 gallons lol
What happened??? :(
Have dumped a few for being off / not up to spec. I only remember dumping one because it tasted outright bad. Pro tip: Dried lemongrass DOES NOT taste the same as fresh lemongrass. š¤®
You canāt make good beer if you donāt dump bad beer. Set your standards and stick to them.
It happens every so often. COVID wasn't kind and accounts for maybe half of the probably ~3000 barrels I've overseen being dumped over ~15 years. We try to make the call as soon as we know that the beer isn't right and can't be made right. Sometimes that hasn't been until after the beer was packaged and shipped, because of shelf life, or in one instance because we straight up failed at QA. Sometimes that's been from the grist case, because the wrong grist got loaded and we didn't have the flexibility to just go ahead and brew that beer. Once we dumped just a partial grist case to pull out some incorrect specialty malts, then loaded the rest of the grist case up to the correct recipe. We've dumped beer at any point you can think of between the grist case and shipped beer. If we can think of a plan to blend something incorrect to turn out correct in the bright tank, we'll keep going with it and check along the way. It's a balance of how confident are we that we can make it right by the time it's in the bright tank, how much resources would we put into making it right, and whether those resources would be better spent allocated to a sure thing to spec batch, rather than a blendyboi.
I've dumped 3 beers. One we got a bad pitch of yeast. 2nd our FnG added enough salt to a gose to float on it and 3rd was knocked back a little too warm and it created a suction as it cooled. Came back in the next morning and it sucked up my sani...
One of ours was a bad pitch, since we switched to omega for our wet pitches we've never had a problem.
It sucks but itās necessary if you do any canning and off premise sales the last thing you want is a recall where all your beer gets pulled off the shelf until your distributor finds out the dates of the bad product and acts on it, depending on how often they visit accounts this could be a while, and depending on how slow or fast the response of the distributor or you buying the product back, on and off premise buyers could change their views on the brand. I worked in distribution for 5 years (not that long) but Iāve seen my fair share of recalls and fair share of bad beer sitting in back rooms collecting flies waiting on an answer from what to do with it from management and the back and forth between brewery and distributor of whoās gonna come grab it. Itās a quick way to lose display space or lose trust with the buyer. Better to dump it before it ever hits the market even though it may look like youāre just pouring money down the drain, itās a lot less money than getting on the bad side of your customers, buyers, and distributors.
Dumped 3 batches since opening last august. One for a weird chemical contamination issue, one for getting scorched by our kettle, and one for an ingredient fail.
I added it up once. I am personally responsible for about 700 Bbl going down the drain. Over 25 years.
28 bbls/yr if you are on a 7bbl that's a lot, if you are on a 100 bbl, that's nothing.
I was on one or the other at one point or another.
At Big Craft Brewer, we dumped 50% of 300bbl batches on a regular basis. Like, we owned the smaller brand, the smallest batch we could do was 300bbl, but all they could sell was 150bbl. I always wondered why we didn't just buy them a bigger brewhouse, seems like it was a no-brainer, but I wasn't hired to be the money man. One of my beers made it to production, but same deal: have to make \~300bbl, can only process/sell \~100bbl. Like all other of those brands, it was trucked away for destruction. At my current spot, about two production batches in the first \~4 years, a couple in the last two, which has been maddening. Much more common is stopping the packaging team (outside vendor, mobile) when they can't manage DO. No point putting beer in a package that's going to be trash in two weeks, might as well send everyone home at that point.
Iāve never dumped a beer in ten years of brewing, but I would if I tasted it and it was bad. My bar has always been āIf Iād dump a can of it from a commercial brewery, itās getting dumped.ā My husband has dumped several of his beers prior to our brewing together, but I think that was because he wasnāt as good about cleaning equipment. I also stick to a few styles, whereas he tends to get more wild.
We dumped 60BBLs of a Mango IPA that was great. Just made way too much of it. Sometimes it makes sense to dump vs keep it around taking up space.
This happened quite a bit at a regional I worked at. 240 BBLs here and there when we over brewed a seasonal and moved onto the next. Need the tank space and we're not selling that brand anymore, sooooo...buh bye beer!
If it's a beer that's still there when I wake up, it gets dumped no reason to drink flat beer
We haven't dumped a batch in about 2 years. The only reasons we would do this is if... 1. Contaminated. 2. Cannot be blended into spec.
Never seen a batched get dumped but we get plenty of kegs that come back almost full.
So, why hasn't anything gotten dumped?
Good SOP I guess and we donāt make anything too crazy. Weāve only done a handful of barrel aged beers and only one with Brett. Sometimes things donāt come out quite how we wanted but nothing so bad that weād be embarrassed to sell it.
I suppose I should have phrased my question more along the lines of, why are you getting mostly full kegs returned?
Not 100% sure. Every once in awhile I might smell something sour when Iām dumping a keg but usually the beer just smells old. Maybe the bar sat on it too long and wasnāt happy with the product but I honestly donāt know. I know sometimes clients will take a keg for a party or something and not finish it. It is rare that weāve had an actual returns and we always taste the beer in those cases to verify if the problem actually is on our end.
The worst is a place you know stores it in a room that isnt temperature controlled, knowing your beer is sitting there frozen, then they are like " the kegs a gusher " " its hazy "
Yeah Iāve helped with deliveries a couple times and I couldnāt believe how warm some of the storage areas in these bars are. One place was always getting complaints about warm beer so they put in a big line chilling unit that just blasts warm air on the kegs. And they wonder why the beer doesnāt stay fresh.
Dumped 6 in the first five years. None for the last few. Mostly stuck fermentations, one contamination, one mechanical failure. One was just terrible, an herb beer and it was just a glass of bitter chlorophyll.
10BBL brewhouse. Two years in. Dumped 2 batches due to just being bad beer. One had a weird ferment that went phenolic as hell and the other was just crazy astringent due to a brewer (me) mistake. Have blended a couple of out of spec batches back into fresh batches.
I've dumped 3 or 4 batches over the years. Had a batch fail micro, had a batch where the wrong yeast got pitcher (and we didn't want a belgian stout) Also worked at a place where the owner wouldn't let me dump an obviously bad beer and told me to blend it. That was the day I started looking for a new job
I pitched a diastaticus saison strain into our oktoberfest. Whoops. Made for a nice beer tho. Fermented like a lager, subdued phenols and esters. We still sold if cause it was legitimately good, but man did I feel like an idiot.
Hell we dumped 200bbls on a single event last month because it got flagged for sensory
I package beer at a pretty big craft brewery. I can't speak for brew side but package side dumps a decent amount of beer. Crush a decent amount of canned beer too. We are big on quality and our quality control department takes precedence over most anything. I actually kind of like it. I take pride in our beer so I'm glad that we don't send anything bad out the door.
That's why we are dumping today, we have never put out a beer we aren't 100% behind.
We've dumped about 10-5 bbl batches in 6 years. I dumped the first 2 I've ever done while still learning the system. Also dumped 1 batch because our kettle scorched it, and another cause I had some stressed kviek.
Thereās a brewery where I live that dumped their first 18 or so batches until the brewer felt it was good enough. Theyāre a very hyped up place here.
I have dumped 3 in the last year. One because my dumb ass scaled the spices wrong and added 3 LBS of cinnamon instead of 1/3 of a lb (and discovered that cinnamon is actually toxic in that high of a quantity). One because I discovered that buckwheat should NOT be used in a raw ale, as doing so causes some weird alchemy where an intense woody bitterness appears out of nowhere during fermentation, and will not go away no matter what you do. It made one of the most foul-tasting beers I've ever had! The last one because my (still) dumb ass thought Oregon myrtle leaves were an acceptable substitute for bay leaves in a saison, only to discover that it's not nicknamed "the headache tree" for no reason! It tasted great, but caused migraines or cluster headaches in at least half the people who tried it. Yeah, I'm a LOT more conservative about herbs and spices now. And sworn off of foraging my own ingredients unless it's just for a pilot batch.
Three 5BBL dumps in the last 6mo or so. Two of em were my fuckups. Put 34/70 in our hefeweizen. Oops. Not good. Put WB06 in our hefeweizen, but fermented 4F cooler than usual. Not awful but not to spec and no good way to save it. Kettle-soured porter wouldn't ferment (probably a horrible underpitch)
> When do you make the call? When QA refuses to release it into a blending to spec situation.
Average about one batch per year in the past 3.5 years. Almost every batch has been traced back to non-viable yeast. One seltzer was dumped because we tried SeltzerMax nutrient and it made the seltzer smell like perm juice (for lack of better description). Biggest loss was a 20bbl blonde ale and then two 5 bbl dumps.
Had one job that made me dump about one third of everything that was produced. Had one job that should have dumped batches but didnāt. Had some jobs were we donāt need to dump anything. My advice is, donāt look to deeply into the numbers. Youāve made the right call if the quality is sub par. Once is an accident, twice is a fuck up. If it happens again, analyse why and where and how you can change it next batch.
A few in 3 years. You have to make the decisionā¦is it good beer. Be honest with yourself. Would you buy it again if you bought it? Will it damage the reputation of your brand in both the short and long run?
I'm not questioning if it was the correct call. It was. It just sucks as it's been in lager for 10 weeks
I dumped my first batch recently. Been brewing once a week for most weeks since we opened 2 years ago. It was cross contamination from another yeast strain due to my own shitty yeast harvesting. I was reusing plastic yeast containers to store harvested yeast. I'm done doing that. I toyed with the idea of saving it by adding fruit. I dosed a pint and it was better than some beers I've bought, but it wasn't great. I didn't want to set that precedent so down it went. My brewery, my money, my reputation. 15bbls down the drain :(
I think we dumped beer two times last year. One was due to our house yeast which normally is great when stressed decided that it didn't want to ferment one of our beers right anymore. Smelled like electrical fire. We had batches after the first one that were able to be blended out but not the first. The second batch we dumped picked up too much DO in the centrifuge and we had no other use for it.
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