Coventry - thieves nick casks (full of dirty water!)

Sep 10, 2006 10 Replies

Odd story from Coventry here



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about a landlord who had a load of full casks/kegs nicked from the back of his pub, but it turned out that all that was inside was dirty water he'd pumped out fromhis flooded cellar.



I'm not sure why the landlord thought it OK to put "poisonous" or at least dirty water into someone else's casks (I presume).



Plus the stolen casks/kegs would probably be worth more than the beer that was in them before!



No: one of our "once in a hundred years" floods did it - I think it was the same one that had hailstones the size of golf balls, one of which put a crack in my car's windscreen!

IIRC the pub used to be a Good Beer Guide entry, so it may be that some small breweries don't stand a cat in hell's chance of getting their casks back now...

Anyway, the thieves did Ray and Sue a favour because they spared them the puzzle of how to get rid of contaminated beer!

Be warned out there: if you get offered casks full of beer on the cheap, you know where they might have come from.

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 12:46:53 +0100, MikeMcG wrote (in article ):

Perhaps it was Young's and he just thought it was flood water.

The report says that the casks were contaminated with flood water when the cellar flooded, not that he put contaminated water in the casks.

In article , Christine writes

Similarly, if anyone is offered casks from Butts Brewery of Great Shefford, or sees beer from another brewery in Butts casks, please let me or the police know. E-mail address in sig.

Butts recently had 60 stolen from their premises.

In article , MikeMcG writes

I didn't know they still made Brew 10.

Mike

Strangely enough the common fare in the area is the incremental p-water (Brew XI)

It's sort of like brew 10 but with any remaining flavour removed.

That one should a guiding principle for all sensible drinkers, i.e. if you see a beer in a cask from a different brewery note down the number from the cask end plate and contact the owning brewery (phone numbers are in the Good Beer Guide)

As a rule I've always done that and where possible returned the cask to the owner rather than the person that supplied the cask. (Caused an argument or two with a couple of rogue agencies)

)

Roy Bailey ( snipped-for-privacy@freeuk.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

They're going to have been nicked for the scrap value, and have almost certainly been weighed in and melted down already.

Ah, OK, I must have got wrong end of stick.

That said, I don't know too many pubs that have 40 (opened/full) casks in their cellar at same time & it would seem one way to get rid of the flood-water by pumping it into handy empty firkins, but as you say, that's not what the article says. MikeMcG

yep, Alan from Butts put the word out via SIBA, firks & kils were nicked, happened last week, plus the folks from Dorset Brewing (formerly Quay?) are building a new brewery & had a load of brand new kit nicked from storage near Weymouth, very sad.

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Lots of breweries doing swaps now, but still a good thing to do - no-one should object to the occasional phone call or email, to see whether cask is being used with owner's authority. MikeMcG

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