Doing the right thing when your beer goes bad.

Here's a story about doing the right thing in the face of a problem.

When Richmond, Virginia brewery, Triple Crossing recently discovered a flavor deficiency with one of its beers, rather than trying to sell the beer, it dumped every single bottle from that batch, and told us about it.

Monday night, we bottled roughly 260 bottles of our precious and favorite Nectar and Knife DIPA. After realizing a minor issue with the finished product, we stopped packaging immediately and dumped...all...of..them.

There, we said it out loud - still hurts. What happened you ask? Honestly, we still aren’t sure, but our instincts say oxidation of some kind given the lower level of carbonation we saw AND the muddled hop character that we work so hard to get in the finished beer. Needless to say, that shit ain’t happening.

Since then, we’ve re-bottled another run with our original method, a more labor intensive, but tried and tested model, that we used when we bottled the last run of Nectar.

With our size, we simply didn’t make enough beer to bottle the same amount after dumping what feels like a ton of it down our floor drain. We want to make sure the product we are providing for you is the absolute best we can manage. So, while it pained us to dump all of this beer, we felt it necessary in the end to maintain the high standards we hold ourselves to.

In 2008, Boston Beer discovered glass shards in a few bottles of its beers. Identifying this as a problem with one of its bottle suppliers, the brewery immediately went public with its discovery, and recalled every single bottle from that batch of beer, nationwide, bad glass or not, and destroyed them.

Many of us in the business have heard stories of breweries selling infected or below-standard beers. I'm sure folk have been in brewpubs where the beer seemed off, but was still being poured. It's refreshing to read stories, like this one, of honest, open, and strict standards. And, to be fair, whether we hear of the stories or not, more often than not better practices and intent do prevail.

Well done, Triple Crossing. But, sorry about the beer.

-----more-----

For more from YFGF:

• Follow on Twitter: @Cizauskas.
• Like on Facebook: YoursForGoodFermentables.
• Follow on Flickr: Cizauskas.