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Rednecktech · 10-05-2007, 11:19 PM

Tainted beer intended strictly for display: Labatt

Beverage 'tasted like nail-polish remover'
Richard Foot, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, October 05, 2007

Quote:

Labatt Breweries is trying to calm the fears of beer drinkers across the country after at least six people in B.C. and Ontario reported finding a dangerously high concentration of ethanol in bottles of Stella Artois beer.

A seventh person now also claims to have become sick after drinking from a tainted bottle of Guinness beer, another Labatt product.

And a Toronto lawyer who represents three of those victims says he wants answers from Labatt, which distributes both products in Canada, about why it waited until July to notify consumers about the problem, after the first incident was allegedly reported to the company in January 2006.

"They say they acted promptly, but the allegations are that they've known about this for a year-and-a-half," says Darcy Merkur, a lawyer with the Toronto firm Thomson Rogers, who represents a B.C. man who encountered a bottle of high-ethanol Stella Artois in January 2006.

Mr. Merkur said in an interview yesterday that his B.C. client promptly reported the incident to Labatt.

In July this year, Labatt and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced an investigation into the fact that six bottles of Stella Artois, sold at restaurants and bars in Toronto and B.C., were discovered to have ethanol levels too high for beer.

Belinda Chopping was one of the unlucky drinkers.

"I went to a restaurant in downtown Toronto in June and ordered a Stella," she said in an interview. "I poured it, took one sip, knew there was something wrong with it, and took it to the restaurant's manager.

"It tasted like nail-polish remover," she said. "It's pretty frightening to think I drank poison unknowingly."

Yesterday, Labatt announced that the faulty bottles were in fact display bottles used for marketing purposes. They were filled with what the company calls "concentrated alcohol," and what the inspection agency calls ethanol and should not have been removed from display cases mounted in bar and restaurant windows.

The company said it had no idea how the bottles ended up in bar fridges for consumption, but that the problem was resolved after thousands of bar owners across the country were notified and all suspect bottles tracked down.

"There was no intent to harm consumers in any way," the company said in a statement. "Labatt has undertaken two comprehensive Canada-wide blitzes, plus a third in Ontario, to identify and retrieve bottles associated with the displays."

Labatt said it has also implemented "strict new control procedures related to marketing displays."

But yesterday, another Toronto woman says she became violently ill after swallowing a substance from a Guinness bottle, purchased not from a bar or restaurant, but from a Toronto-area beer store.

"I took this bottle out of my fridge in July, drank a little bit of it, and my throat burned like if you put hot water or pepper in it," said Christianah Ashaolu, a Nigerian immigrant, in an interview.

After vomiting at home for hours, Ms. Ashaolu, a nurse, called 911 and was taken to a hospital emergency department.

It is not clear yet whether ethanol, or something else, made Ms. Ashaolu sick.

Mr. Merkur noted that Labatt "has never acknowledged that the problem may also relate to beer supplied in beer stores."

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007