Cigar City has problems with a batch

Tampa's Cigar City Brewing's founder, Joey Redner, posted on his brewery's blog that there is a problem with bottles of their excellent Bolita Brown. They are apparently infected with brettanomyces yeast, which gives them a slight sour, funky flavor. It's not a safety issue, rather it's an issue of quality. The Bolita won't taste like Cigar City intended.

Redner writes that he believes the yeast was on their bottling equipment from a previous batch of beer, Guava Grove, that used brettanomyces. He writes:

What this means is the Bolita that went out just fine in its bottles, is now very much not as was intended. If you like brett or bretty oud bruins I suspect you are going to be really tickled about this and want to lay some down for a year. But if, like me, you prefer Bolita the way it was intended I sincerely aplogize. This is my nightmare and the simple fact is we failed on this batch of beer.

Redner is very apologetic about the issue and offers to give everyone who brings a bottle of the beer (all bottles of Bolita are affected*) to the brewery a $10 credit, no questions asked. He continues:

Again, I sincerely do apologize. I know these things happen to the best of breweries, much less our ragtag operation, but it doesn't make me feel any better. I take the quality and integrity of our beer very seriously and this batch ended up with a noticeable infection. You have our promise we will work to remedy the situation as best we can.

This issue does happen to all breweries, and I think Cigar City is handling it really well. As a former homebrewer I know how tricky brewing and quality control is.

You can read their full blog post here.

Ever the creative brewery, Redner writes that they will make lemonade from lemons and take the returned Bolita, put it "in a barrel, add lots of additional bugs, some fruit and whatever else we think we need to add and make a small batch of some very tart and funky beer that started life as Bolita. Think of it as reform school for a beer gone bad. Only the idea is to make the beer go even worse to the point that it is good again!" That sounds like something I'd love to try, as I'm building up a taste for beers with wild yeasts.

*I didn't notice any funky or sour flavors in the bottle of Bolita I had in late August.