[1/08 Update: Widmer Brothers confirms that this will be a year-round brew. It uses Nelson Sauvin hops from New Zealand. Rob Widmer disclosed the reason for dumping the beer on the Beervana blog: “The batch was stuck in the kettle for more than 8 hours. Color development continues, DMS becomes an issue and we’d miss our hop bitterness target. That and the unknown so we didn’t want to fool around.”]

(Portland, OR) – Wow, you don’t hear about a new beer in this fashion very often. Sarah Mirk of the Portland Mercury reported earlier this afternoon that there was a morning power outage in the city of Portland. Other than creating a headache for commuters, the outage left at least one other significant casualty: 7,750 gallons of beer that was in-process at Widmer Brothers. Not just any beer though.

The batch of beer that was lost is a new Imperial IPA that the Portland brewery was working on for a February 1st release. Widmer Brothers Deadlift is a heavily-hopped 9.5% ABV beer and the most expensive one that the brewery is currently making according to Co-Founder, Rob Widmer. That is 62,000 pints according to his math and a major loss for Widmer.

The Mercury notes that it wasn’t a complete loss, “According to Kurt Widmer, the ruined beer will instead be shipped off to cattle farms to be used as either feed or fertilizer. As Kurt explains, Widmer turns most of its beer by-products into cattle feed. After the sugar is extracted from barley malts and wheat malts, the grains apparently make pretty nutritious non-alcoholic cow food.”

Widmer is getting this beer up and going again quickly so that it can still hit the February 1st release date. While I haven’t confirmed this, it would appear that Widmer is slotting Deadlift as a late winter/early spring seasonal release given they don’t currently have one. Given how expensive it is to produce, I doubt they would make it year-round but I will confirm. Surprisingly enough, this will be a year-round release, Widmer Brothers confirms.

The brewery currently has Widmer Brothers Brrr, its early winter seasonal on shelves through this month as well as the brand-new Widmer Brothers Pitch Black IPA.