Sometimes the eye can be deceived.  I noticed in my beer fridge the other day that a six-pack of a local brew I had purchased seemed to contain a lot less liquid than 12 ounces.  If you see the first picture below, one of the beers appeared to be significantly lower.  The one in the middle was at the same level as the other five but when you compare it to another brewery’s bottle level (Dogfish Head), it was still significantly lower. 

At first I thought that maybe that beer had leaked since that had happened once before but when I popped open the bottle it was as carbonated as any other beer.  Then the conspiracy theorist in me surmised that maybe with the skyrocketing cost of malt and hops caused this brewer to shortchange the customer, saying there’s 12 ounces in the bottle when in reality there were only 11 in each one.

So I poured all 3 for comparison into the same style of pint glass and was quite surprised.  The beers are shown in the same order as the picture with the bottles.  Note the one on the right does have slightly more although that could still be due to a non-uniform height of a pint glass bottom.  Don’t worry folks – all three beers were treated humanely and disposed of properly via the state of the art Kirkpatrick Ingestion System.

The bottom line is that even though these bottles appear to be the same shape, there are differences not visible (different inside circumference, different base height levels, different neck sizes, different bottle sizes used in the same brewery…).  I was ready to go on a rant today about how Atlanta Brewing was cheating their customers but I fully admit my initial presumption was totally incorrect.

On a side note, the Red Brick Blonde Ale, which won a Gold Medal at the Great American Beer Festival in the Golden/Blonde Ale category, is really underwhelming.  There are a lot better lighter blonde ales out there and while I like to pimp the local brews, this is not one of them.  Seek out their Summer Ale instead, which is a tasty unfiltered wheat beer.

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On a side note, for those of you wankers who take a bottle from an expensive 4-pack and replace it with a cheaper bottle from a 6-pack from the same brewer, I cast a pox on you and your families.  I can only hope the same thing happens to you one time when you spend $14 on a rare-4-pack and only get 3 of that actual brew.