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Friday, January 08, 2010

Scale

I watched some tweets fly by yesterday talking about a power outage that forced Widmer to dump a batch of beer. This kind of thing happens, and while I felt for the brothers, I didn't think a whole lot about it. Until I saw a bit more about it in today's Oregonian. Key graph:
Among those businesses was Widmer Brothers Brewing Co., 929 N. Russell St. Co-owner Rob Widmer said the brewery lost 250 barrels, or the equivalent of 62,000 pints, of Deadlift Imperial IPA, a new brew and its most expensive beer, because of the outage.
Okay, 250 barrels? That's one king-hell lot of beer. That's a quarter of what an average-sized brewpub might produce in a year. To have to dump that much from a lost batch--to be able to dump that much--demonstrates just how big Widmer has gotten. Somehow comparing annual barrelage doesn't grab me the way hearing this news did.

Oh, and Deadlift IPA?

8 comments:

  1. The power was out for less than a day, was it? I'm curious what exactly prompted them to dump the batch. Were they in the middle of chilling and couldn't get quite to pitching temp, so they feared an infection may have set in in the mean time? Or in the middle of brewing and the wort just sat there in the kettle?

    I recall when Abita suffered through something like a two-week power in late summer 2005 (due to Katrina) they managed to avoid having to dump all their beer.

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  2. The Deadlift IPA is a 9.5% Imperial IPA according to BeerNews.org

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  3. The batch was stuck in the kettle for more than 8 hours. Color development continues, DMS becomes an issue and we'd miss our hop bitterness target. That and the unknown so we didn't want to fool around. The funny thing was that we had some guys show up with kegs hoping to get them filled for free when they heard we were getting rid of a batch!

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  4. Rob, thanks for the inside info. I had figured the batch probably got caught in the middle of something for you to take such a drastic step. I weep for all that lost beer-to-be!

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  5. Why don't they have their own generator?

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  6. you should buy them one, asshole.

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  7. if i owned a major brewery, i would....asshole.

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  8. Ah, the power of social media. Here, we get the inside scoop on why the batch was dumped, which is a great thing to know in its own right, but goes a long way to communicate how serious the brewery is about quality and adherence to standards. The "guys showing up" were prompted by a lone Tweet from @bikeportland about the outage, encouraging folks to go to the brewery with growlers and corny kegs ready for a fill. I wondered, when I heard about the folks showing up to help Widmer Bros. with their problem if they were simply told there was nothing for them, or were they invited into the Gasthaus for a reward? Thanks, Rob, for letting us know what happened.

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