Our Topic- When Craft Beer is Bad
What exactly do you do? Tell the server every beer is crap? Be more sensitive about it? Do what we did, be polite, pay and leave?
I am not going to tell you the name, or where we were city/village-wise. Please don’t tempt me by guessing: I have no desire to destroy anyone’s business. It’s just a damn shame such places give craft a bad name.
I had been here once before, but it was closed and the hours didn’t work for me. This time we came into town to buy something else, so…
We bought the sample tray, filled with an oatmeal stout, a brown, a red, and a fruit Kolsch. We sampled dark to light. We agreed about all 4. The best was the stout, but seemed rather thin, needing more oatmeal. We went down the line and down hill from there: literally and figuratively.
The brown had diacetyl so strong it took me a while to sense it also had a green rubber hose-like phenol. That’s bad because I tend to be somewhat diacetyl blind and very sensitive to that green rubber hose-like phenol. Some call it Band-Aid. The red, yeah some diacetyl is not out of line but this had even more than the brown. Diacetyl soup. If there was a phenol in there the diacetyl was blocking it.
I know, not a kind review: hence me not saying where and what about the brewery.
I saved the worst for the last. The fruit Kolsch seemed to have no fruit in it, except maybe a hint of orange zest. It was such a mess no matter how hard we tried separating out what was what we couldn’t do it, excepting the orange zest-like sense. It was kind of like that competition we judged at years ago where brewers competed for the worst beer. It’s an in club joke part of their serious regular competition complete with funny names.
Millie is the one who classified it: pond scum. The same term Denny Conn uses for NEIPAs. (To me it depend on the NEIPA. I like some, but others? Yeah. I agree.)
The Kolsch was undrinkable. I longed for a dump bucket.
How can any brewer be this off? I have brewed some bad beer, but I would never sell that. And the only beer I ever brewed as bad as the Kolsch I dumped down the drain. I had picked up a hand transfer pump by mistake: the wrong one. I had used it for gas a few days before. The smell became obvious once I realized my neighbor wasn’t transferring gas.
Hm… the Kolsch or my gasoline Imperial Stout. Tough decision.
Solutions? Well, I really think it would be advantageous for breweries, especially when they start, to get a panel of BJCP beer judges to check their beer, make suggestions, and periodically check them. One can become quite blind to tasting your own beer.
That doesn’t mean you HAVE to accept their rulings. It’s YOUR brewery. And of course your customers are the final judges.
However, I must admit it’s hard for me to imagine their staff and brewer didn’t at least have a clue just how off their brews are.
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A Beer Judge’s Diary is one of many columns by Ken Carman, Certified BJCP beer judge, homebrewer since 1979 and seeker of both simple and complex quaffs who once upon a time thought he didn’t care all that much for beer. Then he discovered brews beyond the standard fare’ available on the east coast in the 60s. Thus the adventure began.
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