A Two-Bottle Fail!

Last Sunday was of course FOOTBALL DAY IN AMERICA! I have a great bunch of friends that get together every Sunday when possible to watch the New England Patriots play whomever their victims will be. It is always a great time! More than that, there are always great food pairings at these weekly events, and this past week was no different.

Ed made Guinness beef stew as a combination/experiment of various recipes, and it was awesome. There was all sorts of other great foods - no chips, no sour cream dips, no corn chips, no salsa. It was very good. I brought some pumpernickle and sea salt pretzles with a nice spicy mustard for them.

The game went very well, of course, and the Patriots went on to win it. In the 4th Quarter, Tom broke out some really nice top-shelf rum, very smooth with a vanilla finish. Great for sipping neat.

My big fail - when I held RIBFEST, my yearlyfestibval of all things RIBS on the saturday of Labor Day weekend, my neighbor came over with a small problem. He is a salesman, and one of his friends, also a salesman, is in the beverage distribution/sales market. Well, salesman to salesman, this other guy gives him beer samples , about a case every other month. Well for my neighbor, he was starting to see a pile grow in the garage, so he was wondering if we could take some off his hands for RIBFEST!

Of course we said yes, and soon I was out of his garage with a very eclectic pile of bottles of beer in different sizes and shapes. There were three corked bottles in the bunch - usually taken to be very high end, more expensive varieties.

Well, nobody drank the these larger bottles at Ribfest, so they were sitting in my beer fridge. I decided to bring them over to where we wouldwatch the Patriots game as the only beers I'd bring.

I opened the first bottle on arrival. It was supposed to be a dark, Belgian beer. It was AWEFUL! Tasted like sour spoiled beer and vinegar. It was not flat, just horrible! We dumped it out, rinsed gloasses, and pulled out the second bottle...

I opened the second bottle, a ale by the same brewery that does La Fin Du Monde from Quebec, Canada. It also had gone BAD! It was like watery piss mixed with cloudy sediment, it still was carbonated, but somehow it also had gone bad.

That was the first time I'd opened two bad bottles of beer in a row that were both in such bad shape.

That third corked bottle out in my beer fridge - I'll probably just pour it out in the yard. I just cannot risk another bad glass!

Have you ever had a problem with corked, bottled, un pastuerized, unfiltered beer? Let me know your story!

And today is Sir Arthur Guinness Day!  I know some people may disparage that, but frankly, he did a lot to create his business, and could be a good role model on developing a product, and finding a way to do something creative with barley.