My favorite beer went bad.

Boulevard Brewing Company has been brewing their Single-Wide IPA with bad, skunky/sour, hops on and off for over a year now. Towards the end of December I got two out of three 6 packs that were skunky.

I contacted them about it and after some discussion they told my that they had to assume that I "just don't care for the beer, and that's alright".

But it's not "alright". The truth is they've gotten too big, and they just sold out too, and to the "Devil" no less! (Duvel Moortgat ).

Anyway, I bought way too many skunky 6-packs from them last year, and quite a few other beers I bought were skunky too, so this got me to researching why.

What I found out is that hops like "Centennial" or "Cascade" or whatever kind will go nasty if they're dried and then become exposed to air for too long. A good brewer would toss them or sell them for livestock feed.

But there's also a big difference between hops of the same variety. Some hops can be fresh, and still be skunky. They're just low quality hops. A good brewer would never use those either, unless they were intentionally trying to screw you.

Obviously good hops would bring more money that bad ones, so what's been happening is Boulevard Brewing Company is either getting screwed when they buy hops, or they're intentionally buying crappy hops and using them. Either way, the quality of their beer has been hit or miss and they're missing way too often lately.

So, after those two out of three misses I got to thinking how many times that's happened to me, and how much money I've spent on nasty skunky beer over the years, and it's a lot. It's enough to have bought a really nice sleeping bag, or a nice new pack, or tent, or take your choice. But I would've never intentionally bought crappy beer.

But what can you do? How do you know?

This led me to thinking it'd be nice to have "An app for that", so I registered "www.SkunkyBeers.com" and I think I'm going to make one.

I think an app that would let you search to see if a beer has been called out by beer drinkers as being Skunky would be pretty handy, and it could save you some money.

Anyone got any thoughts or ideas on that?