Pencil & Spoon - Dealing with Bad Beer

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Notall beer is good. Some is faulty, some badly brewed, some isn’t to my taste andsome just tastes really horrible. Last week I drank some horrible beers.


Oneof the beers was a stout. I expected richness, a smooth body, a roasty depth. Igot c-hops and thin, weak coffee (plus some diacetyl...). It was the beer equivalentof a fat 50-year-old dressed up in mini skirt, high heels and plastered intry-hard make-up in that the beer wanted to be something else and failed: itwanted to be an imposing cask stout, highly hopped, stronger than you’d usuallysee, but it just didn’t even get close to being nice.


Therewas also a sub-4% best bitter. Golden in colour, it looked good, but it tasteddisgusting – probably the worst beer I’ve had this year. I can usually tolerateor suffer through beers I don’t enjoy (I did with the stout, just about), butnot this one. The first sniff made me wince. It was like I’d pressed my faceinto a herd of cows. A mouthful was fine to begin – the condition was excellent– but the taste was just unreal. Have you ever tasted hopped wort? It was likethat minus all the sweetness. I love hops but this was bitter beyond pleasureand there was no sweetness, no malt character at all, to balance it.


Asthese were drunk in a decent venue, the staff presumably tasted the beers sothey knew what they were serving. The beers were both well kept – no complaintsthere. They had that little snap of natural carbonation, they had life, theykept their foam throughout, and even though taste is subjective, I struggle tothink that anyone could’ve enjoyed these beers and gone back for more.


Andit leaves me thinking... If I ran that place and I put those beers on the bar,would I continue to serve them after tasting them or would I pull them off thetap? How much responsibility should the bar/pub have on serving beer like this?It damages what I think of the place as well as the breweries. But what canthey do? Make the call that says they don’t like the beer or serve 70 pints ofit and hope for the best? As the only fault is the flavour, then can thecustomer return the beer and ask for something else?


Whena bad beer gets to the pub then who should deal with it and how?


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