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Kane Brewing Company Issues Statement on Mexican Brunch Foaming, Announces Refunds

By: John Couchoud |September 19, 2017

Kane Brewing Company has announced via email that they will be refunding all sales of Mexican Brunch that were purchased for this past weekend’s bottle release. On Saturday night we started hearing of foaming issues with the beer on social media and we experienced it first-hand with a bottle we opened on Sunday. We just chalked it up to the heat, or possibly not being chilled enough. The beer was delicious and we had no worries that there was an issue with the beer.

Kane obviously felt that it needed to be explored and have decided to refund everyone for the bottles within the next 24-48 hours. They are doing this because “Since we opened in 2011 our focus has been on setting and maintaining a consistently high level of quality. With this bottle release we didn’t meet those high internal standards we set for ourselves” As I have said THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BEER! Kane has made the decision based on their own internal standards and is not asking for the bottles back, and gave some suggestions on how to serve the beer to keep the foaming to a minimum.

Needless to say, this is a huge loss of money for Kane and an incredible show of how much Kane not only talks the talk but walks the walk. Kudos to Michael Kane and his staff for not only setting high standards but also following those standards that were set in spite of taking a huge monetary loss.

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Here is the email that was sent today to those who purchased Mexican Brunch:

A Message from Kane Brewing Company:

Over the weekend we became aware of some incidents of Mexican Brunch bottles foaming when opened. We take any potential issues regarding quality seriously and so starting Monday morning we began investigating the issue to determine whether there was a problem. As with all our bottled and canned beers, Mexican Brunch went through a series of laboratory tests to detect any beer spoiling contaminants in the tank and once again in the package – all of which came back negative prior to its release.

Our first step was to re-run all those tests yesterday to confirm that the beer was negative—which it is. We also re-tested the carbonation levels in the bottles. The result was between 2.2-2.4 volumes of carbonation which is in the correct tolerance for this beer (Head High is carbonated at 2.5 volumes as a point of reference). We then proceeded to open a few cases of archived bottles that we save from each release that were from different points in the bottling run. Our results mirrored what we are hearing in the market place. A large portion of our bottles were fine, but we did encounter some that foamed when opened. Since we ruled out contamination and over-carbonation, we then considered other causes of foaming in beer–specifically nucleation points.

After some research, we believe that the foaming in some bottles was caused by nucleation points which is attributed to the abundant amount of the specific spices we used in Mexican Brunch. As we got closer to the end of the bottling run more of the spice particulates that had settled to the bottom of the tank ended up in some of the bottles. These spice particulates when in abundance cause CO2 to rapidly break out of solution creating excess foaming.

Since we have no way of knowing which bottles or how many are impacted, we are issuing a full refund to anyone who purchased Mexican Brunch. We are not asking for the bottles back or that you discard them because there is no issue with the beer and the flavor should not be impacted. There is also no need to store them cold, but we do recommend that you chill the bottles down completely prior to opening and pour quickly into a glass once opened. Since we opened in 2011 our focus has been on setting and maintaining a consistently high level of quality. With this bottle release we didn’t met those high internal standards we set for ourselves. We will continue to research this issue to prevent this problem in the future. The refund will post to your accounts within 24-48 hours. If you have any questions at all please email us at hello@kanebrewing.com.