BIG BEER BURGLARY

USUALLY WHEN a heist happens in the world of alcohol it’s fine wine that’s being stolen. But a mystery has been brewing in Atlanta, where someone stole an ocean of beer. SweetWater Brewing Co. says nearly 33OO cases of beer went missing in June when two of its refrigerated trailers were stolen. The trailers had been loaded for a morning pickup when they were taken from the plant. “For a small company like us to lose that much beer, it really hurts,” said Steve Farace, who handles marketing for the 14O-employee craft beer company. The two trailers carried 3272 cases altogether – or more than 78,5OO bottles – of SweetWater’s Summer Variety Pack, company spokeswoman Tucker Berta Sarkisian said.

Both trailers were later found in the Atlanta area by using GPS, but were empty. And within a day about one-fourth of the stolen beer was found at a warehouse in Clayton County just south of Atlanta. But even though some of the beer was located, “we can no longer trust that that beer would be up to the quality standards that we as a brewery maintain, so unfortunately we have to destroy it all,” Farace said. The timing of the heist was unfortunate, because one of the beers in the Variety Packs contained the company’s “Goin’ Coastal”, a pineapple-flavored IPA which has been in extremely short supply. The theft essentially wiped out the entire Atlanta inventory for that particular beer. The warehouse where the beer was found isn’t far from some of the locations where the 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit was filmed. In the movie, Coors Beer is hauled across the South with a sheriff in hot pursuit. How times and tastes have changed.