Boston brewery floods leaving shortage of beloved craft brew (VIDEO)

Eric Pfeiffer
·Reporter

A popular Boston area brewery is expecting a shortage after a gasket failed, causing their brewery to flood with 1,500 gallons of the very product its customers love.

“When we came in the morning, we came into a mess,” Jack’s Abby Brewing Company co-owner Jack Hendler he told CBS Boston. “The good side of the whole mess is there was never a safety issue for anyone working. It was simply a waste of beer issue.”

All told, Hendler says about 700 cases worth of beer were lost in the spill. Prior to the spill, Hendler said demand for “ Jabby Brau” was already outpacing production, meaning the temporary halt is going to leave more than a few mouths dry this holiday season.

For those not familiar with the popular American Pale Lager, Jabby Brau is described as offering a “subtle American hop profile with a clean malty finish,” and maintains a healthy 88 percent rating on the Beer Advocate website. Or, as Drink Craft Beer’s Jeff Wharton describes it, “This is a beer I would happily drink all day long.”

“We hope that they’ll take pity on us going forward,” Hendler said of the lager’s fans.

After the flood Wednesday morning, the brewery posted video of the accident and let customers know the bad news, posting video of the spill on their company Facebook page. “We weren’t sure they’d believe us, Hendler told CBS Boston. “We were hoping to prove that we weren’t lying to them.

As the company explained in a Facebook post accompanying the video: “Early this morning a gasket failed on a tank of Jabby Brau, that was to be bottled this morning, and we lost the entire batch. We have enough inventory of kegs that we should not run out of stock, but we will be out of bottles until the beginning of January.”

However, not all is lost. For more devout fans of Jabby Brau, Hendler says customers can still buy kegs of the brew while they wait for bottles to become available with the next batch. Hendler also noted that all of the brewery’s other beers are currently available and none were damaged in the spill.