A Tale Of Woe

Woe! Woe!

Last summer I brewed up a big batch of hefeweizen for my 20th high school reunion. My plan was to ship a bunch of bottles to my buddy Dean's place for chilling and ground transport to the actual event.

I wrapped the bottles individually in bubble wrap and packed three boxes full. I was basically shipping water, so the price was a bit steep but it seemed worth it. I left the three boxes in the mailroom, wrote down the tracking numbers and went about planning the rest of my trip.

A couple days later I got a call from DHL:

DHL: What's in these boxes?
B: Yeast samples. (had I mentioned it's not legal to ship beer like that?)
DHL: What?
B: Live yeast samples. I am sending them to a friend who is a brewer.
DHL: Oh. Well that explains the smell.
B: What smell?
DHL: It looks like a bottle broke and your boxes smell like stale beer.
B: Boxes? As in, more than one box?
DHL: Yes, we have two damaged boxes here at our facility in Burbank.

I thought I told them to just throw the two boxes out but the next day I returned from a meeting to find this waiting for me:

Here's a close-up of the back of the tag:

Eventually I stopped weeping for long enough to cut the box open. Two of the six bottles had broken.

So, in the end, only six bottles of my precious homebrew made it to the reunion and the whole office smelled like a frat house for a few days. Oh the humanity!