This is kind of scary, but I’m glad they’re stepping up to let people know about this rather than try and brush it under the rug. I just wanted to re-post the information here in case anyone reading might want to check their fridge or let their friends know. A good chunk of the news release is below, and you can read it yourself here.

During a routine bottle inspection at one of our breweries, we detected possible defects in a small percentage of bottles resulting in the random presence of bits of glass, most the size of grains of sand, but some small slivers in some bottles as well. Based on this sample, we quickly began testing bottles of Samuel Adams at all of our breweries and identified that the problem appeared to be isolated to a single glass plant of the five that supply us.

We assembled a panel of food safety, medical and packaging experts including a medical doctor who have thoroughly evaluated the samples. People who bite or swallow a fragment could possibly be injured. While the possibility of injury to an individual consumer is very low and the Company has had no reports of any injury, we do know that the risk is not zero, so we are voluntarily recalling all products in bottles from this specific glass plant that we believe could possibly be affected. While we believe that the number of bottles that actually contain glass is significantly less than 1% of the bottles we are recalling, we are taking this measure to protect the safety of our drinkers.

Bottles made in other glass plants that supply us have not shown defects. The potentially affected bottles are easily identified by a raised letter and number visible on the bottom edge of the bottle. Affected bottles are embossed with the digits “N35” followed by the letters “OI”. Please see the photo below. Bottles with this coding should not be drunk.

This post isn’t about any dramatic or sweeping changes going on around here, I just felt I would keep people in the loop in case you’ve noticed some stuff going on in the past week or two.

First of all, you will probably notice that at this point in time the design of the site has been changed. This is due to the fact that along with the recent upgrade on the server to WordPress2.5, I have finally done away with K2. K2′s developers are “hard at work” (using their words – not that I don’t believe they are) to publish a release that fully supports WP2.5, but honestly I don’t much care anymore. K2 was a huge boon when the core WordPress installation didn’t do a lot of the cool functionality that K2 could provide, but nowadays the added bonuses just aren’t worth the headaches to me whenever the need to upgrade WordPress comes about. The past two upgrades have gotten completely messed up thanks to K2, meaning I couldn’t use the theme without some form of a “patch”; the upgrade to 2.5 rendered the entire admin section useless without either performing a database removal of the reference to K2 or, thanks to one intelligent soul who figured this out and shared the solution with others, adding some code to the admin login script so that you could actually log in to manage the site. Sorry K2, it was fun while it lasted but I’m moving on. It’s true that other themes may themselves have unforeseen compatibility issues with future upgrades, but they typically don’t hook into the core functionality of WordPress nearly as much as K2 did so future speed bumps will be much easier to overcome.

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Tonight the wife and I went to the Wine Tasting event hosted by LARC, her former employer. It was a good time last year, and it was a nice excuse for her to see a lot of her former coworkers again since she’s been at her new job for about 6 weeks or so. She never had a problem with the people she worked with, but the commute was hell and the new job looked to be very promising for her in multiple facets which was why she had left. And the added bonus this year was that she wasn’t “working” the event either, which meant we could spend all our time there together instead of her having to make sure only VIP’s made it into the VIP room or taking tickets from people at the door.

This being their second year putting on the event, it was obvious they had learned some things from last year. Number one, they brought in bottled water which was clutch. Last year they didn’t have anything bottled on hand and most of the people there were complaining about the water in the pitchers “tasting funny” since it was, truly, just tap water from a kitchen in the back of the Elks Lodge where the event was held. They also brought in some beer as well, which was a nice change of pace even though I am a wine fan. One of the distributors had some Dogfish Head on hand, where I got to experience their seasonal Aprihop for the first time. WOW is all I can say; what a great brew. It’s very reminiscent of Magic Hat‘s #9, only it seems to hit all the right notes even better than the #9 does it. Another “Apricot Pale Ale”, Aprihop just really surprised me and I will definitely be buying some of this in the near future.

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