How Often do Brwers Dump Beer

Reads 5072 • Replies 33 • Started Wednesday, April 13, 2016 12:44:36 PM CT

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beastiefan2k
beers 5012 º places 294 º 12:44 Wed 4/13/2016

How often do breweries need to dump wort or fermented beer? It can be due to mistakes, infections, space issues, or some other miscellaneous reasons.

Anyone have knowledge or experience?

 
beastiefan2k
beers 5012 º places 294 º 12:45 Wed 4/13/2016

damn typo!

 
sebletitje
beers 11868 º places 491 º 12:56 Wed 4/13/2016

I thought it was an excuse to come up with expensive sour aged IRS. One-off wonders using the best of local flora or one size fits all solution, do a barrel aged version.

 
sloth
beers 3473 º places 102 º 13:16 Wed 4/13/2016

Can’t imagine. Was up at Victory,s new brewery a little while back and they were lettin a goodly amount go down the drain. Kinda brought a tear to my eyes. Lotsa beer lost there!

 
DietPepsican
beers 1592 º places 63 º 13:17 Wed 4/13/2016

Wonder how many brewers just rename an every day beer when it isn’t quite up to par.

 
after4ever
admin
beers 8025 º places 322 º 13:19 Wed 4/13/2016

Questions like these are why it’s fun to buy a couple beers for pro brewers--get them tipsy enough to tell ya goofy shit about life in the brewhouse.

 
lithy
beers 2996 º places 156 º 13:23 Wed 4/13/2016

Worked at the brewery I am at for 5 years. We have dumped 3 batches since I have been here. So maybe the average for us will be something like 1 batch every 2 years? For reference we do about 200 brews per year. So 1/400 is one-fourth of one percent. Still never good to dump product, but as for total liquid losses, we are losing about 7% of finished beer on our small scale bottling line, so there are definitely other bigger concerns as long as we aren’t dumping product due to infection/quality issues.

The one most recently (only a couple months ago) was due to a milling issue where a cellarman used caramunich in place of munich malt for a dunkel. Suffice to say, 40% cara malt was not going to taste much like a dunkel. Wort was dumped before it left the brewhouse.

The other two were simultaneous about 3 years ago. During some brewhouse renovations a piece of tubing was used for temporary hot water storage that was not approved for potable water. This led to a very strong phenolic plastic aroma/flavor leeched into our hot water. The batches went to the fermenters but were dumped before packaging.

 
lithy
beers 2996 º places 156 º 13:31 Wed 4/13/2016

Originally posted by sloth
Can’t imagine. Was up at Victory,s new brewery a little while back and they were lettin a goodly amount go down the drain. Kinda brought a tear to my eyes. Lotsa beer lost there!


Oh and if we’re just talking about normal product losses from regular operations. Still lots. You lose wort between the kettle and fermenter, you lose beer between the fermenter and brite tank, you lose beer between the brite tank and the package, and you lose beer between the package and the customer.

And it all scales, so if we make 1,000bbls of tax paid beer each year, we might have produced 1200+bbls of wort in our brewhouse. And if some other brewery produced 100,000bbls per year, they might dump more beer than we make in a year. And on it goes, up to the millions of barrels that places like AB make. You can bet their guys know the exact loss targets though a lot better than the small places do.

 
3fourths
beers 9492 º places 1576 º 13:33 Wed 4/13/2016
 
mkgrenwel
beers 619 º places 117 º 13:42 Wed 4/13/2016

In my short experience in the pro brewing world, I never saw a batch dump, and it had only happened once in any employee’s memory as far as i could gather. Something about a bird getting loose in the brewhouse and then suddenly disappearing...

I worked in packaging for a summer at another MUCH larger brewery. I don’t know what went on in the brewhouse, but I know huge amounts of finished bottles would be chucked just because the labels were a little crooked or didn’t have enough glue on them. They were on the verge of rolling out a system that extract energy from the ethanol in the waste beer to help power the brewery.

So the answer is it depends a lot.

 
cheap
beers 8841 º places 328 º 13:57 Wed 4/13/2016

Any ’not as expected beer (especially infected gone wild)’ should be renamed and sold as brew. That is, as long as it is not detrimental to the digestive process.