Cloudy with a chance of rotten egg - a beer drinker's dilemma

11 January 2017 - 20:42 By Wendy Knowler
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Beer comes with all sorts of whacky flavours these days‚ but rotten eggs is clearly off-trend.

SA Breweries unintentionally created a batch of sulphur-tasting Miller Genuine Draft beer which has now been withdrawn from trade.

But not before quite a few customers got a nasty surprise.

Diane Macpherson of Durban said she’d discovered several cloudy‚ foul smelling bottles of Miller during the festive season‚ over several weeks and bought in different parts of KZN.

“It wasn’t the whole case each time‚” she said‚ “just some bottles in each one.” She reported this to SAB’s customer care unit‚ got an apology and a compensation voucher and was told not to consume the “off” beer.

SAB’s head of media and communications‚ Robyn Chalmers‚ said a batch of improperly sealed bottle tops - “crowns” in industry-speak - in a production run at the end of October had caused the problem.

“The affected 330ml bottles were not airtight‚ which resulted in the ‘cloudy’ appearance‚” she said.

The beers looked fine when they left the plant and met all the usual quality criteria‚ but the spoiling started becoming evident about five weeks later‚ and the customer care team’s Miller complaints spiked at the end of December.

Less than 1% of the production run of about 65‚000 cases was affected‚ Chalmers said.

The affected beers may look and taste odd‚ she said‚ but they aren’t harmful to people’s health.

“SAB takes the quality of our products very seriously and our aim is always to provide consumers with the best product satisfaction - it is for this reason we have advised consumers to not consume the affected product‚” Chalmers said.

She urged consumers who come across cloudy Millers to contact SAB’s customer care line: 0860 12 14 14.

-TMG Digital/ConsumerLIVE

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