Warm Beer To-Go - A sensible approach

Taylor Smack over at Blue Mountain Brewery penned a note on Facebook recently in which he addresses some of the myths about buying warm beer vs. cold beer. If you're worried about your beer purchase warming up a bit between the store and home, don't. A bit of warming and cooling just doesn't matter all that much. With Taylor's permission I have reprinted his note here.

Warm beer to-go...aarrghhh!!!
by Blue Mountain Brewery on Friday, December 17, 2010 at 1:31pm

We just lost a sale this morning and I am compelled to post as this has happened before. Here's the deal: sometimes customers want to buy their beer warm, because they are traveling with it. Seems OK, right? I mean, you can buy beer in the store warm and not worry about that warm/cold/warm/cold back and forth skunking the beer, right? So we should TOTALLY sell beer to people warm if they want it, right? WRONG! Here's the truth, folks: all beer is bottled cold; it's how you get the carbonation to stay in solution! IF you buy warm beer it is simply beer that was once cold that got warm. So if you buy our beer cold and let it get warm, at least it was kept cold (i.e. in the most stable, freshness-keeping state) as long as possible. Letting it warm up in your car one time is no worse (and in fact a lot better) than buying it warm at some store.

Yet this morning my hard-working staff were absolutely unable to convince a customer of this--he literally said he was going to drive 30 minutes to Beer Run in Charlottesville and buy Blue Mountain beer warm, for a couple dollars more per six-pack! What?!? Now, God bless the Beer Run guys and all our wonderful retailers but the fact is that if you buy our beer warm somewhere it is only warm because it was filtered cold, bottled cold, got loaded onto my distributor's truck where it warmed up a bit, sat in my distributor's warehouse for a few weeks where it warmed up a lot, got loaded on my distributor's truck (mid-August, anyone?) and then loaded onto a shelf at a store where it sat--wait for it!--WARM!

The kicker? Our distributor's delivery driver was out front overhearing this while he waited for us to finish a bottling run of the very beer the customer wanted! He laughed his ass off and told the guy, "Look, they're literally back there bottling this right now!" The fellow wanted to hear none of it. He wanted his beer warm. So if you're out there, buddy, congrats on the purchase of beer that was at least a month older than what you could have gotten today. And guess what...it was once cold too, like the beer you passed up this morning! Aaarrrgghhhh!

Our staff occasionally has a hard time convincing people of the simple logic that warm beer is simply cold beer that warmed up, and they ask me to just give in and keep some warm beer out for these hard-headed folks, but to our loyal Facebookers out there...y'all get why I won't give in to this ridiculous breech in logic, right?

Venting over. Signing off to enjoy one of the fresh, cold Full Nelson's I just bottled!

-Taylor

This brings to mind the factory beer company that promotes their beer as "cold-filtered." Sure, just like every other beer.