A family have said out-of-date beer bought at a Welsh B&M store exploded over their Christmas dinner and made a man sick. Jane Proctor bought three Shipyard IPA beers on Monday, December 23 from the store at Western Avenue Retail Park in Cardiff.
She said the beers were bought as a Christmas treat for her partner, Huw John, who has stage four throat cancer and is unable to eat using his mouth. However, when he opened the beer during the family’s Christmas dinner, Jane said the beer exploded all over the turkey and had a strange taste and smell.
Jane said Huw began vomiting and had nothing tasty to enjoy on Christmas Day. After revisiting the shop on December 26, she said she was disturbed to fine out-of-date beers still available for sale. For the latest Cardiff news, sign up to our newsletter here. A B&M spokesman has apologised for the incident, and said the product has been removed from the shelves.
Jane told WalesOnline: “I only called in there for some dog food, not intending to buy anything else. Next to the dog food they had all sorts of beers. I thought because my partner can’t eat – he was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer last year and is tube fed – as a treat for Christmas I would get him some IPA, which he likes. It would take him a long time to drink because he can only take small sips, but I thought it would be nice for him to sip while we were having our Christmas dinner. They were on offer so I bought three for £5.”
Describing what happened when Huw opened the beer, Jane said: “It exploded all over the Christmas dinner. He had a quick mouthful to stop the foam from going all over the turkey and promptly vomited. It smelt funny and tasted funny – it was off.”
Jane said it was then that he inspected the bottles more closely and discovered they were months beyond their sell-by date. She pointed out that newly shop-bought alcohol tends to have a long sell by date, meaning the family didn’t consider that anything would be wrong with it before opening it.
She said: “When we looked at the bottle all three of these bottles were past their expiry date, varying between April and July 2024. They could have been on the shelf for a year and we bought them.”
When the family went back to the store on Boxing Day to notify staff, Jane said they were disgusted to see out of date bottles still up for sale. She said: “We went back on Boxing Day to look at the shelf and all the Shipyard and all the Doom Bar were way out of date. This wasn’t just one bottle, it was all of them. This is a big retailer, this is appalling. We can’t have been the only ones who bought them.”
Jane claimed staff at the store seemed “uninterested” and “did not apologise”. She said she further complained to the company who asked her a series of questions about her purchase. However, she said she has not heard back a week later and claimed she has not received any apology. She said she has also informed trading standards of the issue.
