Deschutes Brewery's limited edition Green Monster ale is the result of an ingredient mistake three years ago. “The Green Monster is really a celebration of a mistake that's turned itself around,” brewer Veronica Vega said.

Even at the biggest brewery in Bend, mistakes happen.

Nearly three years ago, a big mishap occurred at Deschutes Brewery when it was discovered that a nearly 200-barrel batch of the brewery’s Green Lakes Organic Ale was accidently made with malt that wasn’t certified organic.

The beer was unsalable under the label, leaving the brewers faced with a potentially pricey conundrum: What to do with all that beer?

The answer to that question was only fully realized this past month when the brewery released the once unusable Green Lakes Ale as the newly-minted, limited-edition Green Monster, proving that mistakes are really only a matter of perspective.

“The Green Monster is really a celebration of a mistake that’s turned itself around,” said Veronica Vega, Deschutes Brewery brewer.

When it comes to brewing, even the professionals have their bad beer moments. Using the wrong ingredients in recipes and problems during the fermentation process are challenges local brewers have faced while bringing beer to your table.

“Brewing is a hugely complicated process, especially when it comes to production,” said Vega. “Lots of people are involved, and mistakes can happen.”

In the case of the Green Monster, brewers saved the beer by letting time transform it into something completely new. They decided to place the bad beer in Oregon pinot wine casks, infect it with wild yeast, and let it sit for several years until it became a reinvented sour beer.

“Over the years we had to meticulously go through every barrel and taste them all,” Vega said. “Some barrels we had to dump because they were basically malt vinegar. But other barrels were amazing.”

All the good barrels were eventually blended together to create the Green Monster, a 7.3 ABV beer that was officially released Sept. 2 and is now available at the brewery’s pub.

When mistakes do happen at craft breweries, the last thing a brewer wants to do is call it quits.

“We consider the beer like our children,” Jimmy Seifert, 10 Barrel Brewing’s head brewer, said. “You never want to bury a child, so you do as much as possible to try and save it.”

Though Seifert said no large-scale mishaps have happened at 10 Barrel, he does remember one incident that occurred during his time as a brewer at Deschutes Brewery back in 2008.

While brewing up a pale ale, the wrong type of malt was added to the beer. With hopes of saving it, Seifert let the beer ferment as he would a normal pale ale.

“All of a sudden it became like a porter, but with no body to it,” Seifert said. “I tried to dilute it down with water, but it basically tasted like a glass of water after dropping burnt toast into it. It went from being bad to being a trainwreck that just started rolling away from me.”

Seifert thought about dumping the wayward beer but finally decided to try one more thing before letting it go down the drain. He aged it a couple more weeks with vanilla beans, hoping that the sweet floral notes would save the beer from its demise.

The result? A few weeks later the beer was debuted at the grand opening of the brewery’s Portland pub. Once a train wreck, it became the pub’s No. 1 selling beer while it lasted.

Some mistakes are easier fixes than others, though. Over at Bend Brewing Company, brewmaster Ian Larkin said he’s never had a large-scale disaster but has occasionally been challenged by the ingredients.

“Things can happen with the yeast,” Larkin said. “As you get farther along into generations, it tends to get a little lazy on you and might not eat through all the sugars.”

A few years ago, Larkin had a batch of beer that was under attenuated, meaning the yeast didn’t eat through all the sugars, leaving the beer overly-sweet. The solution? Larkin brewed up another batch of the same beer, making it dryer, and eventually combined the two to create the flavor he was after: an easy fix to what could have been a big problem.

Vega said that as brewers continue to push the boundaries of traditional craft brewing, mistakes are to be expected. Luckily, most of those mistakes take place at a smaller-scale as brewers experiment in small batches.

“It’s all how you look at it,” Vega said. “You can view it as a mistake, or you can view it as slowly moving forward and getting better.”