Never...

...have I dumped a beer without even sipping it. Until tonight.

After a spectacularly bad day (during which, among other things, I lost more money than I'd spend in a year on beer), I thought I'd try the beer in my fridge. What beer? Why, the Stone Pale Ale that I bought like a fool from Beers of the World. You know, the one that I bought two weeks ago that said "best if enjoyed by 7/27/07" on it, and has probably been sitting in its top shelf, light-filled spot for months before that.

Well, I took the trusty bottle opener to it, pried off the cap, and the first thing that I noticed was severe discoloration of the inside of the cap. Odd, but whatever...that's probably not relevant. So I poured the beer, which came out looking incredibly cloudy. Far cloudier than a Pale Ale should. Maybe that's just the nature of that brew, I don't know.

But what finally did it for me was the smell. This beer, friends, smelled like feet. I don't mean "oh, it smelled a little funny". I'm talking very literal odor of feet. So, being the retarded OCD food safety germophobe that I am, I just dumped it in the sink.

Lesson learned: although the majority of beers don't bother with an expiration/freshness date, always check anyway. Even though this one was *probably* safe to drink, the fact that it still smelled like feet would have ended up forcing me to dump it sooner or later anyway, just like the dirty glass incident from a few months ago.