Completely irresponsible. Especially with the lackuster warnings that are going on some of these cans. Some beers just shouldn’t leave the tap room. Not to long ago, a plastic Coke bottle exploded and some kid needed to get stitches. Corona bottles have been enjoying, and a guy lost a good chunk of his vision. In my opinion, jail time should be an option for this kind of flagrant disregard for safety. I’d be fired on the spot if I let this kind of thing happen at work.
There you have it. (And some “beers” shouldn’t even make it that far.)
While I totally agree with your assessment of this very sad series of events, unless it happens multiple times from the same brewer/manufacturer/producer, nothing will happen. There simply isn’t enough money available to go after them. Yes, totally irresponsible. Great post!
In the early days we had some bottles explode. Ended up costing us thousands of dollars. This was with a shared bottler. One of the other breweries ran a brett strain through and we were unaware.
This year we used a strain of yeast from another yeast supplier (not Wyeast/White Labs). Turns out that strain was blended with a diastaticus strain. I had no idea. We had some cans explode. Granted, the ones that exploded were over 4 months old and not refrigerated.
I understand your indignation up to a point. But brewing is a living and breathing process, and other unforeseeable factors sometimes will play a role. Like any industry there can be safety problems that creep up. The food industry is one that can unfortunately be unpredictable. But so can the automotive industry. Housing industry. Think about all the safety recalls you see every day. Sh!t happens.
We are constantly striving to improve our lab practices. Safety in the brewery of our employees and safety of our customers is our top priority. And we spend a lot of money on liability insurance. Thankfully we have never had to use it, and I pray we never do.
Here in Germany, often perceived to be ordered in their approach everything, they often have a much more Darwinian (?) approach to things, Federweißer is very common everywhere when in season but if you are a tourist and do not read German I can imagine an exploding bottle is not at all uncommon (not a good thing), as a homebrewer I was quite shocked when I moved here to find that they sold this stuff.
I think a big difference here though is that breweries are deliberately creating the safety hazard of exploding cans (by canning/bottling right after adding fermentable sugars), vs. not realizing a safety hazard exists (e.g. because they weren’t aware of the presence of Brett or diastaticus). You’re right that scheisse happens due to accident or mistake, but adding fermentable sugar to a beer right before packaging is neither an accident nor mistake. Exploding cans are completely foreseeable.
Thanks for that I admit I hadn’t read the article. My bad.
There’s a trend now that breweries are packaging super sweet, underattenuated stouts. I imagine these are going to cause problems.
The argument made in the article that these products are like milk or other foods that have to be kept cold is not a great argument. If you leave a gallon of milk on the counter for a few days then it spoils and you get sick drinking it. You can smell it and know it’s bad. Bad milk doesn’t blow up in your face and milk isn’t packaged in a way that can cause serious injury when milk goes bad. Most milk sold to consumers is also pasteurized to prevent the product from quickly spoiling or causing sickness.
It’s the basic function of brewing that sugar plus yeast equals fermentation and a natural product is one form of gas or another. Breweries putting out these beers in packages know what they are doing and the harm that can be caused by an exploding aluminum tube. These beers don’t just spoil, they explode. If breweries want to release beer with that much unfermentable sugar then they need to add sufficient preservatives to stall fermentation or pasteurize the beers.
Analogizing beer to dairy products is inviting a problem for breweries. Dairy products are heavily regulated specifically because of the high risk of illness. If breweries want their products to be treated like dairy then they might be treated like dairy and find themselves subject to FDA regulation or far more aggressive TTB regulation. I would be highly unsurprised to see the TTB issue regulations in the near future requiring beers sold packaged or to go above a fairly low final gravity to have to be pasteurized.
Strangely enough, outside of this article I had never heard of this problem. I did see a picture of the cans with dynamite on them with a caption that the brewery was “in on the joke” but no other context. Reading the article it does seem to be intentional and the breweries know what can/will happen.
No matter what you put on a label, the onus will never fall on the consumer to “know how to handle your product safely”. Food safety always falls to the producer.
Not really related to exploding cans, but FDA regulation of breweries is on the horizon. I don’t know exactly when, but it’s been in the works for a while and we’re working on prepping for it. I don’t know how severe some of the stuff will be, but label requirements like calories and ingredients will be required like with other food products. The TTB (to my knowledge) will only shut you down if you’re selling 10% beer that’s labeled as 8.5%, but the FDA can shut you down for cleanliness, safety, worker conditions, etc etc. Tighter regulation will be a good thing for the overall industry but it’ll put some people out of business I’m sure.
I have a friend that this happened to. I don’t recall specifically which beer it was, but it was something with blueberry added that he got in a trade. Not long after he got it, the can exploded in his dad’s living room. Needless to say his dad wasn’t happy about it.
I definitely agree with the consensus, adding fruit or puree to a beer right before bottling/canning is not a good idea.