Dumping beer. It is a harsh blow on multiple fronts. The pride of a brewer, the checkbook of the brewery and possibly to the brand if allowed to go on tap.
The crux of the matter though is that beer will be dumped. Talk to any brewery and they have drain poured a batch, two batches or more. It is part and parcel with brewing. But yet, you rarely see a brewery openly talking about it without modifiers.
Maybe with time, the diacetyl will fade. Maybe as part of a blend. Maybe dry hop it. Maybe call it an experimental batch.
Even as a non brewer, I get that the dispiriting feeling must be horrible and granted that first time as a new brewery, when you are a small start-up and the batch is crap, it stings the most. It takes the wind out of your newly flown sails.
But it happens and it though certainly not wished for, you should take advantage of the situation. Tell your community that you have strict standards and that a batch went south, keg some to show your customers what to look for in a bad beer. Most of all, find out what the problem is and nail that down. You certainly don’t want to lose future batches to a problem that could have been solved earlier in time.
Speaking of, it’s Bad analogy time. If you were driving the wrong way down a one way street, would you just keep driving to the end and hope you don’t run into someone or get a ticket? Or would you reverse course and start heading in the correct flow of traffic? What if no one was watching and you really think you could get away with it?
Because you won’t. Not now. The traffic isn’t light anymore. There are 5,000+ cars on the roads and police officers (like me) who are becoming less lenient and ready to write tickets more. If I am served uniformly mediocre beer, I will probably not blog about it, nor will I be in a hurry to re-visit. But if I get a poorly executed beer, I probably will talk about it and I may not visit again unless there was a really killer beer to counterweigh the bad one.
A brewery doesn’t need to be proud that they dumped a batch but they should view it as standard operating procedure.