What do craft brewers do with experimental batches?

Title says it all. Do they give it to employees? Dump it? Keg it for special release in the brewpub? All the above? I was just reading about the SN Abbey series coming out next year and I was wondering how many batches a brewery must go through before they find a recipe they like.

The few brewers that I know in brewpubs sell it along with their regulars if they think it turned out well. If they think they screwed the pooch, they will dump it.

Many larger breweries will have a smaller system to do experimental batches on, and scale up when they think they have it right.

Awesome question! Great answer!

However, what do they do with that "experimental" small batch? Chuck it if it's not "perfect"? Someone is drinking that, I guarantee...but whom? Unless it's total crap, I bet it's employees. If it's better than "not total crap" it's probably served somewhere. That's just my rambling 4-beers-in guess, though.

The few experimental batches that I was part of when I worked in a brewery were either done for special events or put on the bar in the hospitality room for sampling by employees and customers. Quite simply asking customers, "What do you think of this?" I never saw anything dumped. The batches only amounted to one or two 50L kegs.

One of our local breweries, Odells, has a 5 barrel pilot system that they experiment with. I remember a few years back when they were trying to perfect their red ale they had several different red ales in the tap room for folks to try and comment on. A brew called "Trellis" in the tap room became Mountain Standard, Bret Barrel Brown became Saboteur.

For some breweries (many really) the pilot system is a 10 gallon homebrew system so clearly employees can drink that if they want or they can dump it. Generally they will plan on selling the first full batch.

Some breweries do pilot batches on their full sized system or maybe on an old smaller but still commercial sized system. They may serve this in the tasting room and solicit feedback, they may go through the trouble of making a label and registering with states so they can give it as an exclusive to a few drought accounts, they may dump it even. Of course some breweries (and almost all brewpubs) will just make a full sized batch of the new beer and plan on selling it to the public.

Talking to commercial brewers, they are less likely to need to dial in a recipe than homebrewers. They brew more often than us, usually with a smaller list of ingredients than us, and they just know far better how a beer will turn out on their system. John Maier has said he almost always gets what he wanted on the first try.

I know Dogfish Head has a small brewing set up at their brewpub in Rehoboth Beach and when they make their experimental batches it's on that set up. They then sell it at their brewpub and if it's a big hit they mass produce it at their brewery and if it's not they just label it as a "brewpub exclusive" and sell it until they run out and then don't make it again.

Put it on the backroom tap.

They sell it.

Say you're after a hoppy brown ale and you miss the mark on overall hoppy-ness. You label it something clever, design a neat label, and sell it. If you never brew it again, you write it off as a loss.

Labels are expensive. Selling it to TTB, printing labels, registering the name, all that costs money. But the beer costs money, too.

It's easier for a brewpub, or for breweries with attached pubs, as others have noted. But you still sell it, preferably marketing it as an "uber-special, one-off get it while there's some left" sort of thing.

Dumping is the very, very last resort, because dumping hurt$!

Bob

Bob said:

Dumping is the very, very last resort, because dumping hurt$!

Click to expand...

I had many "experimental" beers at local brewpubs that were dumpers (not tasty at all)....But, there's always a sucker who'll buy the "it's an uber special, one-off beer you have to have" argument.

Sad.

All the small breweries I know around here sell their experimental batches.

The only time I've hear of Widmer dumping a batch (250 barrels!) was when they lost power for most of a day mid-boil. So this wasn't really beer being dumped.

The Word got out and many homebrewers showed up with carboys hoping to score some free wort, but it got dumped.

They do their experimental beers on a 10 barrel pilot system. This is the same system Collaborators get to brew with. It's a rare beer that doesn't make it to the Gasthaus.