St. Arnolds Brewery to dump 10,000 Gallon of their newest beer

[Chuginator]

Actually no, that sounds ridiculous. Anyone investing any amount of money for that amount of ingredients is going to know better.

 

[dallasdb]

As a business decision it might be good but it is still wasteful. What if it was something food related say gourmet pasta sauce or something else like that. A company would take a lot of grief for throwing away food that doesn't "meet their high standards". It makes more sense to do something productive with it than putting it down the drain.

They could give it to local farmers, beer is great for soil. However, logistics would be tough transporting that much liquid somewhere.

 

[dallasdb]

When's the last time you heard about Anheiser dumping 11000 gal of product? It happens every day.

Anheiser doesn't dump beer, they have chemists on payroll to concoct a fix or brew a batch that will even out a mistake. However, Anheiser probably spills more beer in their bottling and can line than St. Arnold produces!

 

[Chuginator]

No, I really don't believe it was a publicity stunt (just poking fun before).

Tragic, and somewhat mysterious. Probably every head brewer's nightmare.

 

[DannyD]

slap a lable on it and call it "LION" (a very bad SouthAfrican beer that has been discontineud )

 

[rhoadsrage]

I'm curios on the cost of dumping 11K of beer. How much would ingredients, time, gas and that cost to produce that much beer? or maybe it is easier to just start with there per bottle cost to make beer and multiply?

If this is a $2000 dump that is a lot different than a $11,000 dump.

 

[IrregularPulse]

I would rather see a brewery, donate it to the homeless, or funk it, spice it or barrel it just to see what happens.

I admire them for putting their name behind a quality product but that is still a lot of beer to waste.

I'd dump it too instead of wasting even more money in spices, and yeast strains that they don't typically use, not to mention, no professional brewery is going to want to risk introducing infectious strains into their brewery. Not to mention tying up a storage tank and space for who knows how long that could be used for known good product. On a Homebrew level this makes sense. For them, not so much. Dump it and cut your losses instead of increasing them.

distill that schit!

I'm sure they don't have a distillery license being a brewer.

As a business decision it might be good but it is still wasteful. What if it was something food related say gourmet pasta sauce or something else like that. A company would take a lot of grief for throwing away food that doesn't "meet their high standards". It makes more sense to do something productive with it than putting it down the drain.

Again, the laws around alcohol make it an open and shut case. Open valve, catch a few glasses as it goes down the drain. Don't spend man hours searching around for what to do with it. Get the tank emptied, cleaned and refilled as soon as possible.

Publicity stunt. They didn't actually brew 10K gallons and toss it.

If they did, someone should lose their job over it.

Someone should lose their job because of one mistake? Everyone here would be fired at some point I'm sure. Ever scale a homebrew recipe? Sometimes they don't quite come out as predicted when scaled up.

Same deal. It's wasteful. I don't see how beer is any different than any other food product. Unless it's contaminated and tastes like crap they should dispose of it in a better way than just flushing it.

It's not food that you can simply donate. There are strict laws around alcohol as anyone on this board should be aware of. Easiest solution, down the drain.

 

[Taypo]

I honestly wonder how bad it had to be in order for them to dump it - most of their normal stuff is pretty meh to begin with...I've tried pretty much every one of their offerings since moving out to Texas. Not bad, but not great.

 

[Zixxer10R]

Saint Arnold Announces Delay of Santo Release

HOUSTON, August 23, 2011 – Saint Arnold Brewing Company (www.saintarnold.com), the oldest craft brewery in Texas, today announced it will delay the release of its newest beer, Santo. The scheduled release date was September 1, 2011. Below is a statement from Brock Wagner, Saint Arnold Founder/Brewer:

We regret to announce that we are delaying the release of our newest beer, Santo. After brewing a 10 gallon test brew several months ago that we were enthusiastic about, we scaled up the recipe and recently brewed our standard 3,700 gallon batch. In fact, we have three such batches in the fermenters right now. After filtering a batch this week and getting it ready for packaging we tasted it. It was good, but it was missing that spark that separates a good beer from a great beer. So we are dumping the over 11,000 gallons of beer we have in the tanks.

We are brewing another batch tomorrow with a series of recipe tweaks. We will taste this in two to three weeks. If we are excited about the results, we will release it then (or more likely, about three weeks later so we can brew some additional batches). If we again do not believe it is a world class beer, we'll continue tweaking. We apologize for this issue. We would rather experience the embarrassment of delaying the release than release something that isn't the best beer we can brew.

The company has not set a new release date for Santo, but the earliest a full release could occur would be sometime in October 2011.

Editors: A high resolution image of Santo packaging is available for download at http://dpkpr.com/photos/9/1024x771/.

About Saint Arnold Brewing Company

Saint Arnold Brewing's ten brews are made and sold by the company’s staff of 35 dedicated employees. The brewery was listed by USA Today as one of the “10 great places to see what’s brewing in beer,” and Smart Meetings magazine named it among the “Top 5 breweries to host an event.” Saint Arnold is located at 2000 Lyons Avenue and its brewery tour and tasting is offered every weekday at 3:00 P.M. and Saturdays starting at 11 A.M. For more information on Saint Arnold's five year-round and five seasonal beers as well as root beer, log on to www.saintarnold.com.

So basically we all need to do our part and brew clones in memorium. Anybody got a clone recipe? Extract or AG is fine for me.

 

[Zixxer10R]

Slap a generic label and sell it for dirt cheap

They can just call it BMC.

 

[Zixxer10R]

Well it's ironic seeing as though st arnolds lawnmower is the only beer I ever dumped out

Are you kidding me? That's excellent after a long mowing session!

 

[brian74]

Mr. Wagner and myself in May...at his place.

 

[Tim_Kreitz]

Interesting. I've lived in Texas my entire life, have been brewing since '99, and have consumed many Texas beers. But Saint Arnold's, somehow or another, has never managed to grace my palette; at least not that I can remember. I will now make a deliberate effort to seek it out.

 

[Zixxer10R]

Good on you, Tim. You'll not regret it.

 

[Tim_Kreitz]

Good on you, Tim. You'll not regret it.

:rockin:

 

[weirdboy]

Damn, I was looking forward to trying 'Santo'. Owner Brock Wagner tweeted "There are good days. And then there are days we dump 11,000 barrels of beer."

11,000 BARRELS? I think gallons.

 

[Zixxer10R]

I agree, aren't most micro-breweries only set up for multiple hundreds of bbls?

 

[Tim_Kreitz]

11,000 barrels? I think gallons.

+1.

 

[Kegcowboy]

+1.

Yes it was gallons. The reporter Ronnie Crocker recognized the typo. You guys should check out his blog he picks up on some very interesting beer news in Texas.

 

[jaginger]

I'm curios on the cost of dumping 11K of beer. How much would ingredients, time, gas and that cost to produce that much beer? or maybe it is easier to just start with there per bottle cost to make beer and multiply?

If this is a $2000 dump that is a lot different than a $11,000 dump.

$10k - $15k to make that much beer.

 

[thezepster]

Just read this in Froth!: "Astoundingly perhaps, fully 60% of the capital expediture for commercial beer production and distribution is due to packaging; only 20% is due to brewing the beer."

Very difficult decision to dump that much beer but it could have been a lot worse if they decided to bottle it.

 

[rico567]

$10k - $15k to make that much beer.

.....but don't forget this is a business, and whatever it cost to dump that beer, it's a tax deduction.

 

[jaginger]

Excellent point Rico; so more like $6,500 - $10k after tax cost.

In reality, the economic cost is the amount of the forgone sales, less bottling and other intermediary costs to take the brew from its current state to the shelves (including taxes, of course.) But we're just spitballing anyway, so the above figure is good enough for me.