Beer Sold at the Grocery Store is Fair Game
In response to my mass market tasting, part one, Jack writes:
Indeed, it's naked contempt for your customers to sell them beer in a green bottle. The brewery knows it's going to get skunked, but makes a calculation that the customer can be won over by a big ad campaign, anyway. I want to give every brewery a fair shake. I strongly reject the false correlation of brewery size and beer quality. But if you don't want beer writers to excoriate you for selling skunked beer, don't sell the damned stuff in green bottles. It's very fair for me to taste the beer the brewery puts on grocery shelves.
re: lightstuck Stella and Beck'sAbsolutely not. I made sure to purchase the beer at a high-volume grocery store (Freddy's), but I bought the samples in a manner I could afford (twenty half-racks, just to get one beer from each that's not lightstruck, is crazy). Where possible, I tried to determine how fresh the beer was, though not all breweries make that easy. And come on: American breweries have figured out that if you're going to package your beer for appearance, you use hop extracts that lack the compound that gets lightstruck. If you're going to sell me a bottle of beer in a green bottle, you can't say it's "unfair" of me to have noticed that it's skunked. There is a lot that is out of a brewery's hands once a palette of beer leaves the brewery, but not that.
For fairness, you should seek non-abused beers for comparison. Eg, a bottle from the middle of a light blocking cardboard carton box or canned beer.
Indeed, it's naked contempt for your customers to sell them beer in a green bottle. The brewery knows it's going to get skunked, but makes a calculation that the customer can be won over by a big ad campaign, anyway. I want to give every brewery a fair shake. I strongly reject the false correlation of brewery size and beer quality. But if you don't want beer writers to excoriate you for selling skunked beer, don't sell the damned stuff in green bottles. It's very fair for me to taste the beer the brewery puts on grocery shelves.