Crushing news on the beer front
A few weeks ago I had lunch at the improbably named Tryst restaurant with a woman who had moved to Boston in the mid-1990s. Her first job here, she explained, was as a beer destroyer for the
Beer destroyer! Say it ain't so! But it is so. Each year, Sam Adams, Coors, and others destroy hundreds of thousands of gallons of perfectly drinkable beer that would be more than welcome at an MIT fraternity party.
The reason, of course, is the ''freshness dating" policy introduced by Sam Adams in 1988 and since mimicked by some -- but not all -- other brewers. Sam Adams and Coors clearly label their products with a ''sell by" date. Anheuser-Busch (Bud, Michelob, etc.) displays the date when the beer was supposedly brewed, and promises to sell it within 110 days.
Beer executions take place only as a last resort. ''Freshness" turns out to be something of a gray area. Stale beer poses no health hazard and is not regulated by health authorities. Most of the time it doesn't even taste bad. Even though Sam Adams, A-B, and some smaller brewers replace outdated beer in stores, it's a hassle to push outdated product backward through the sales chain.
So rather than kill beer, brewers prefer to discount the suds as they approach the ''sell by" date, or just dump it in an unfinicky market. ''If they've got old beer, sometimes they'll find another account to sell it to, like a Building 19 of beer," says Sam Adams founder Jim Koch. ''If you were in Northern California, you could sell it in Oakland. Around here you could do it in Lawrence, because there aren't a lot of distributors checking for fresh product there."
I visited three liquor stores and talked to one manager on the phone, inquiring about beer freshness. The consensus was that A-B, which has been hyping its ''born on" date since 1996, is the most scrupulous about freshness -- especially if higher-level executives are in town visiting accounts. A Coors spokeswoman told me that ''if a retailer calls us and says he has out-of-date product, in general we would pick up that beer and it would be destroyed by a specific process."
This is where things get sticky. The EPA won't let you pour beer down the sewer because alcohol stifles oxygen in the water supply. Secondly, dead beer has to be destroyed by a company that can issue a valid Certificate of Destruction so the brewery can reclaim the taxes it paid to the IRS when it first shipped the product.
A few years ago, Koch visited Parallel Products's recycling center in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., to watch some of his profits literally go down the drain. ''It was hotter than hell, and there were insects everywhere," Koch recalls. ''There were all these guys wearing long-sleeved flannel shirts and heavy gloves dropping old beer into a crusher."
''It makes you want to cry," says Parallel sales manager Gus Ansback. ''You watch those little soldiers go down, and you think, 'There goes another coldie.' " Parallel sells the recovered aluminum and glass, and ships the beer directly to its neighboring ethanol plant. It then sells the ethanol to gasoline refiners for use as an additive.
''I like to think that cars all over California are running on recycled Sam Adams," Koch says.
Game highlights
Every cloud has a silver lining. Happily for Curt Schilling, his lingering ankle injury has afforded him more time to play Everquest II, one of those weirdo, role-playing computer games that author Steven Johnson (this space, May 17) insists boost your intelligence -- even though no one really believes him.
Earlier this month, Schilling discussed his early-morning (meaning 3 a.m.) hobby with Andrew ''Tamat" Beegle of the Everquest II Warcry fan website. Asked about his most memorable Everquest moments, the hurler replied:
''Drow's original Gunny, one night he was foraging, talking trash on guildies and in chat and splat, falls off a cliff and dies, laughed for 30 minutes at that one. Another one was when one of our original Coercers, Obms, was killed to the point of nakedness during an early Maidens Gulch Raid. It was like 2 a.m., we just wipe for the 6-7th time, I turn around and there's a naked ratonga, emoting left and right about covering himself and yelling in ooc not to look. Spur of the moment stuff like that I remember."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist.His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
