Not every drop of beer produced by an award-winning craft brewery is quaffed by an appreciative drinker. In fact, thousands of gallons are consumed by no one and go down the drain.
Colorado's award-winning brewery WeldWerks, which opened in 2015, estimates that it disposed of 350 barrels of beer during the past two years, because of dissatisfaction with the taste, carbonation or quality. That's nearly 11,000 gallons.
Colorado-based WeldWerks Brewing Company pours many award-winning beers, but sometimes the brewery ... [+]
WeldWerks Brewing Company"Pure ingredient cost for those barrels was close to $30,000, which doesn't take into account soft costs or lost revenue from the potential sale of that liquid," says Jake Goodman, the director of marketing for Greeley-based WeldWerks, which is best known for its New England-style IPA Juicy Bits. "The lost revenue is pretty significant."
Beer dumped from the brewery's tanks goes down the drain, while packaged beer goes down the drain or is destroyed by a local vendor," he says.
Some, though, is good enough to fill employees' glasses.
"If it's fit for consumption, we give the staff, family, friends and our special events team a chance to take as much as they want," Goodman says. "Some of the destroyed beer went to our big hand-sanitizer manufacturing project."
MORE FOR YOU
WeldWerks employees recognized a hand-sanitizer shortage last March and teamed with two distilleries and other companies to produce and donate bottles of hand sanitizer to first responders, medical professionals and the general public.
During the past two years, batches of 11 different beers were dumped. The trashed batches were Froot Camp: Peach, Blood Orange, Raspberry; Evil Pastry Stout Factory; Papaya Blueberry Milkshake; Cherry Vanilla Milkshake; Cereal Keller; Beta Bits; Fit Bits; Tripel, Hefeweizen; a collaboration with Denver-based Burns Family Artisan Ales called Old Norway/New England, and a collaboration called Rex Machina with Jester King of Austin, Texas.
Last summer, WeldWerks was "gearing up for two highly anticipated new releases, Cereal Keller and Papaya Blueberry Milkshake," Goodman says. "With label artwork created, cans ready to go and more than 600 cases primed for public consumption, the stage was set."
But the carbonization for a 15-barrel batch of Cereal Keller, an unfiltered lager, "was off," Goodman says. "Ultimately, the brewery decided to destroy the beer, because it wasn’t quite there."
The following month, WeldWerks brewed a batch of Papaya Blueberry Milkshake, but the quality of the bitterness "was a bit too harsh and lingering," he says. "The brewery gave the beer another week of conditioning time — still no dice. The brewery dumped 30 barrels of the Milkshake IPA down the drain."
For a brewery and manufacturing company with slim margins, dumping beer is not an easy decision. Considering the cost of ingredients, labor, packaging materials, soft production costs and lost revenue, WeldWerks lost about $50,000 when it dumped the two beers last summer.
"For WeldWerks, the $50,000 lesson was that the consumer experience is much more valuable than surrendering to profits," Goodman says. "If a customer walked into a liquor store to try the Papaya Blueberry Milkshake IPA — and it was the first WeldWerks beer the consumer tried — that would have been detrimental."
Since WeldWerks opened six years ago in a market oversaturated with breweries, the brewery "has been steadfast in gaining consumer confidence with quality beer," Goodman says. To ensure quality, WeldWerks has held internal blind tastings to test its beers against other breweries' beers; purchased a pasteurizer to produce shelf-stable beer; bought a centrifuge to increase production capacity and product consistency, and dumped beer, he says.
"With a growing fanbase with discernible palates, WeldWerks is willing to rise to the occasion," Goldman says, "to put out a quality product every time — even if that means dumping beer."
January 28, 2021 at 07:30PM
https://ift.tt/3t7FbW3
Colorado Brewery Throws Away Thousands Of Gallons Of Beer - Forbes
https://ift.tt/2NyjRFM
Beer
No comments:
Post a Comment