Widmer Bros. lose 250 barrels...

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HoppyDaze

HoppyDaze

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Widmer Bros. loses 250 barrels due to a fire at Pacific Power. Apparently they had to shut off the power to get the fire out. With no heads up the brewery lost 62,000 pints of Deadlift Imperial IPA...their most expensive beer.

From this article it looks like the power was out as long as 10 hours in some locations. I would be pissed!
 
Sounds like they were in the middle of mashing (since their tun is 250 barrels). The process is 100% computer controlled. Maybe Rob will give OBC some of the details at the next meeting.
 
Thats a bummer. Although it won't be devastating for them, does anyone know if they possibly had an insurance that would cover it? Or something of the sort?
 
david_42 said:
Sounds like they were in the middle of mashing (since their tun is 250 barrels). The process is 100% computer controlled. Maybe Rob will give OBC some of the details at the next meeting.
Click to expand...

Some of their beers they do at much lower volumes. I guess their alt is only produced 10 barrels at a time.
 
cford1 said:
Thats a bummer. Although it won't be devastating for them, does anyone know if they possibly had an insurance that would cover it? Or something of the sort?
Click to expand...

They are publicly traded and so certainly have insurance but I would guess its not covering at least the first 10,000 dollars of loss.
 
Yeah, they have a pilot system that they use for small runs, including Collaborator beers. However, the main mash tun is 250 barrels.
 
From Rob: (found on http://beervana.blogspot.com/2010/01/scale.html#links)
Anonymous Rob Widmer said...

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!
Click to expand...
 
They should have kept it and sold it as some limited special release. They could call it Deadpower Imperial IPA or something. I'd buy a 22.
 
Yeah, they could have fermented it out and sold it, but that is a rather large scale experiment.
 
No big deal...they can just sell it to CoorsMillerBudweiser and they'll release it as a Seasonal Special Lager.
 
Time to invest in a nice CAT Olympian generator... it just accept the fact that you will lose 1 batch of beer a year due to power outages.
 

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