"quality control" news and stories

Every day, new beers hit the market. And not just the latest take on American lagers like Budweiser or Miller Lite: More likely than not, the newest draft at the neighborhood pub is a craft beer, often times in a style or from a brand that patrons aren't familiar with.

Ironically, drinkers who are already converted craft beer snobs are even more likely to encounter beers of which they have little knowledge. Beer geeks seek out these unique experiences, hunting down a draft from the newest brewery or clamoring to try a non-traditional style so they can be the first to ponder these products' worth.

Most beer drinkers fall somewhere in the middle: familiar with some craft beers and occasionally want to try something different. The question becomes, though, if you don't know exactly what you're ordering, how do you know if what's in your glass tastes right?

How do you know when a beer has gone bad? And how should you handle it?

Remember that godawful Virgin food I showed you the other day, and the creative letter written to complain about it? Well, it looks like if you make something entertaining enough that it spreads like wildfire through the Internet, you may just get a response.

The Consumerist reports that Virgin Atlantic have invited the unhappy passenger to "come to the airline's catering house next month, to help select the food on future Virgin flights." As Consumerist says, this is definitely a publicity stunt and not the best "gift" for their passenger.

Think about it. People are choosing this food. I'd bet my bottom dollar that the food they pick isn't quite what what ends up on the passenger's tiny table, because who would pick slop that looked like that anyway? Now give him the option to help choose the dinners and police the airline every few months for quality control purposes? That would be a sweet gig.

Officials in Taipei have ordered the makers Taiwan Beer to reexamine their quality control measures after the most recent in what seems to be a string of complaints. A Banqiao man recently found an aluminum wrapper and a rusty staple in one of his unopened bottles of Taiwan Beer. New Party Taipei City Councilor Li Ching-yuan recently told the Taipei Times that this is not the first time the popular brew has raised such complaints. Li cited several other instances in which bottle caps, cigarette butts, insects both live and dead, and, get this, a "condom-like" object have been found in bottles of Taiwan Beer. A directory at Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation, the brewery that produced roughly 280 million bottles of Taiwan Beer a year, apologized for the most recent incident and said that the factory would work on improving quality control.

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