Bolero Snort Recalling 2015 Apple Brandy Bergen County Bottles

Since launching in February 2013, we have always strived to create high quality, approachable beers that are uniquely (all bull puns aside) Bolero Snort.

The start of that journey saw our beers in draft and 6-packs of 12oz bottles through our partnership with High Point Brewing Company in Butler. As we approached our 1st Anniversary, we felt it important to celebrate and do so with a packaged product that fit that theme. High Point’s equipment limited our production to 12oz bottles, so we built a 4-head counter pressure filler, specifically to package Happy Buck’n Anniversary. It was an incredibly long day, with help from a lot of friends to help sanitize, purge, fill and cap nearly 1,000 bottles by hand – but worth every bit of it when cracking the brew to commemorate 1 year of ragin’ good beer.

Our core beers were doing well, but we wanted to continue to bring new and exciting beers to our fans. Unfortunately, the brewing industry is all about volume, and we are a very small drop in the bucket of craft brewing. Items like 6-pack carriers have to be purchased with minimums – which for some may not be a big deal, but we finally after 2.5 years have just run out of the original carriers we bought for flagship Ragin’ Bull. Buying years worth of carriers for new seasonal beers was not sustainable.  The first idea to circumvent this was a brief foray into mobile canning in 2014, but after two runs we found there were too many equipment limitations in an almost 20 year old brewery to keep up with it.

The introduction of 4-packs using pak-techs allowed us to get some seasonal releases to market, but it was never a format we were really satisfied with, just a stop gap. After our second anniversary rolled around and we busted out the 4-head filler for its annual run, we got to thinking. It was a long day, but not quite as long as the last time. We had this great tool, but weren’t taking full advantage of it. So when the concept for El Matador came about, we thought a single special bottle was the way to go, and we had just the tool to do it.

All of our beer is brewed up at High Point. All 12oz bottles are filled by High Point using their large (very fast) German-made line. All other bottle formats (375/500/750mL & 22oz) are filled off of kegs filled by High Point (for measurement purposes) by our team, on our line. Packaging days have come a very long way from our first run with Happy Buck’n Anniversary. More streamlined, faster, better practices for sanitization and cleanliness throughout the process but some times, even with the best planning and execution, things go wrong.

With the help of some industry friends (who are way smarter than us when it comes to using a microscope) we’ve drastically increased our QA/QC over the past few months.

Prior to packaging, all four barrel variants of Bergen County Bull Stout, including the Apple Brandy version came back clean. Subsequent to the release, we started receiving some feedback about an off-putting aroma from some, while rave reviews from others. Unfortunately due to the limited nature of the beer, with most of it going out into the market for the fans, we had a small sample size for testing post-bottling. From the few saved and/or consumed by members of our team over the past few weeks we believe that somewhere in the bottling process, somewhere between 12% to 25% of the Apple Brandy variant was compromised. We suspect it could have been one of the vessels used for carbonation (barrel aged beers as they always run the risk of carrying bugs from the wood are never pumped back into one of our large tanks at High Point on top of the fact that volume wise it wouldn’t make sense) or one of the 4 fill heads on our bottling line, though it just as easily could have just been a handful of caps that weren’t properly handled/sanitized. Despite being numbered, the numbers do not correlate to a filler, so there’s no way to track down the specifics with it. Only take what happened and learn from it.

Obviously we have no way of knowing if you are in the majority (who have a bottle thats just fine) or minority (sour cream potato chip beer), so we ask you to be upfront and honest and only contact us if you have a problematic bottle. Please email [email protected] with the subject “2015 Apple Brandy Bergen County”. Include your name, address and a picture of the bottle # on the bottle.

All that said (are you still with us), we don’t know how, or when, but we intend to make up for those of you that spent the time hunting down this variant, who paid good money for it, and were disappointed.

2015 has been a whirlwind year. We appreciate everyone out there who are willing to give our brews a shot, and look forward to continuing to put out high quality, flavorful, RAGIN’ GOOD BEER.

Cheers!