You don’t hear the word “quality” used as an expression of approval that much any more. It wasn’t that long ago that everything was dubbed quality - that goal last night, that cheesy action film, that actually terrible Oasis album. For a while, quality was favoured over awesome, terrific, excellent, brilliant, fantastic, wonderful, great, wicked, mint, cracking, ace, ceramic, Mexico, and any other term you could think to use. Now, it seems to be past its sell by date - unless you’re someone like, I don’t know, the president of the USA.
Quality has a different usage as well, of course. When not being an outdated adjective, it’s a very pertinent noun - the standard of something as measured against its peers; a degree of excellence. Quality seems like a singular concept, an intangible yet identifiable thing, a pure and immutable beacon pitched against the forces of failure and mediocrity.
That’s why quality control is such an important idea - especially when it comes to beer. With so many breweries now competing for taplines, shelf space and drinkers’ tastebuds, holding high standards when it comes to quality is - or should be - the only way to compete. To sell yourself short, to release a substandard product, is - or should be - a death knell for a company. If you don’t care about quality, why should anyone care about you? We demand the best, not the merely good enough.
It’s an issue that has come to prominence recently. Sometimes, quality isn’t just a matter of taste, it’s a matter of safety. Cloudwater, fifth best brewery in the world according to RateBeer, made its considerable reputation on a constantly changing, seasonal line-up, defined only by experimentation and excellence. Sometimes, in pushing those boundaries, mistakes get made, as with their Make Apple Pie Great Again ale, a delicious beer that really did taste of apple pie - all pulpy Granny Smiths and cinnamon - but came with the unfortunate side effect of cans exploding from time to time. A swift and serious recall showed they weren’t messing around when it came to quality control.
Then again, sometimes it really just a matter of taste. Today, Cloudwater announced they were dumping a fermenter full of lager thanks to the presence of too much acetaldehyde (ironically, the compound responsible for a green apple flavour), saying it wouldn’t do their customers justice. Goose Island found themselves in a similar boat when it turned out swathes of its world beating Bourbon County stout was infected and offered refunds. It’s this kind of commitment to quality that builds a reputation for a brewery.
That’s why it’s so frustrating to still find breweries pushing out stuff they must know is deeply flawed. Even in the past weekend, I had two canned beers from a pair of small breweries, only to find one was a scorched earth of smoky phenols crammed into a supposed Bavarian helles, while the other was a classic English IPA that had become a metallic soup, like slurping on a slurry of batteries. I can accept that mistakes happen after the beer is packaged - that everything was given the okay in the first instance, that the first swig tasted swell - but there’s no excuse for not making regular checks, or taking samples from across the range, to ensure that what you’re sending out to market is as good as you think it is.
Maybe they just don’t realise. There’s plenty of education still to be done with consumers about off flavours - how to identify the difference between a beer that you’re just not a fan off and one that is seriously defective - but maybe there are brewers out there who need a similar lesson. It’s hard to believe, considering how every homebrewer I’ve met has been all too aware of every one of their beer’s failings, but perhaps the glamour of a canning line and seeing your efforts out in the world is enough to mask the actual rancid taste, to convince you that you must be doing something right.
How do you even address this though? I’m sure people reading this will be wondering which beers I’m talking about and wanting me to name names - but does public shaming really work? I’ve seen enough tweetstorms and Facebook threads derailed by criticisms, warranted or not, to know that these things rarely go well. An email to the brewer? A quiet boycott? It’s a minefield.
That’s why I’m always cheered to see a brewery owning up to problems and taking responsibility for issues, whatever they may be. Welsh standouts Tiny Rebel had to deal with their own hiccup this week, when they found an issue with dissolved oxygen in some of their batches of cans. They issued a recall, ceased sales, and pledged to improve their laboratory processes and assessment practices. It’s exactly what you want to see a brewery doing, and exactly why the Newport mainstays have become a regional powerhouse, with beers like Cwtch, Hadouken, and the wonderfully spot-on Stay Puft Marshmallow Porter winning such acclaim.
Their current feelgood hit of the summer - and one of the unfortunately impacted beers - is Clwb Tropicana, a fruited IPA (as is the fashion these days) that’s packed with American hops, and topped off with peach, passion fruit, pineapple and mango - basically, boozy Lilt.
Thankfully, checking the gyle number means this can is good to go. It pours a luminescent gold, neither murky nor clear, with a creamy white head sitting proudly atop. The aroma is childhood sweets and adulthood cocktails, a perfume of synthetic pineapple and underripe mango, both a pack of Fruit Salads and a jug of fluorescent alcopops masquerading as a mixed drink in a chain pub. Thankfully the taste isn’t quite as cloying as you’d first suspect - the fruit is there, but there’s the sharp acidity of pineapple to go along with the tinned sweetness, saddled up with a rolling woody bitterness that helps ground the IPA in the realm of actual beer. There’s a slightly different fruit expression happening with every sip - a dab of the peach here, a burst of the passion fruit there - but it melds together into a juicy blinder, a playground tipple that trips along nicely. It’s a lovely thing, perhaps a touch too sweet for a long session, but perfect for a swift one on a hot day.
It’s terrific. It’s cracking. It’s quality.
Disclosure: Though I’ve bought Tiny Rebel beers on many occasions, this particular can was a free sample provided by distributor Matthew Clark