Yesterday I dumped 2 batches of finished beer. Over 7 gallons poured down the drain. I didn’t dump the beer because I felt a need to punish myself, but rather because the beer didn’t turn out how I wanted. Both batches had been neglected when I got busy at the end of the year and ended up oxidized with plenty of off flavors. Just because I brewed it doesn’t mean I need to force myself to drink it.
When a commercial brewery has to dump a batch of beer it usually means thousands of dollars in lost revenue. That is a much bigger penalty than a homebrewer. As a homebrewer we likely only have about $30-40 tied up in a batch. While I don’t want to suggest that $40 is a meaningless amount of money, there are benefits to dumping out beer.
The benefit I am most grateful for is I don’t have to drink bad beer. If I had not dumped the beer yesterday I would have been stuck drinking 3 cases worth of bad beer. That’s not why I started brewing my own beer! Of course I didn’t start brewing my own beer to make bad beer either.
The other big benefit is it allows us to quickly learn from our mistakes. Tasting the two beers gave me notes on what was wrong and now I can try to correct it next time around. More importantly, dumping these beers freed up resources for me to keep brewing. In my case I got a fermenter and keg back. Now I have a fermenter I can brew a beer into and a keg I can fill with another beer that is waiting.
Having to dump a beer is never fun, but if we take advantage of the opportunity to get better than it won’t be a complete waste. Have you ever needed to dump a beer?