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| The rodent, still in the Miller Lite bottle, was sent to an expert and identified as a deer mouse. Randy Anglen |
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| Randy Anglen examines a photograph of the dead mouse with its stomach exposed. The mouse appeared not to have gone through the pasteurization process. Joanna Doria / News-Leader |
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| And finally, he starts yelling. Sleep proved elusive after all that. Joanna Doria / News-Leader |
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| Randy Anglen relives looking at the bottom of the empty bottle and seeing the mouse ... Joanna Doria / News-Leader |
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| Then panic starts building ... Joanna Doria / News-Leader |
News-Leader Staff
Hollister — It'll be a long time before Judge Randy Anglen can enjoy a cold bottle of beer.
On a Tuesday in late May, Anglen — Hollister's municipal judge and a practicing attorney for 14 years in Taney County — came home from work, had dinner and grabbed a Miller Lite from the fridge. He slipped it into a cooler sleeve, twisted off the top and drank the beer over the next few minutes. He drained the last bit into the sink so he could put the bottle in his recycling bin.
When he set the dark brown bottle on the counter, he heard a "plop" as something dropped from the neck to the bottom of the bottle. He pulled the bottle out of its sleeve. When he peered into it, the first thing he saw was a long tail coiling around the inside of the bottle.
Then he saw the rest of the mouse.
A big, whole dead mouse.
"The first thing I did was scream in horror. Then I screamed in revulsion. Then I dropped to the ground, holding my head in my hands while I was still screaming.
"My wife ran in, holding our 1-year-old, and she started screaming and the baby was screaming because she didn't know what was wrong with me. It was five minutes before I could regain enough composure to say: 'Don't worry. I'm OK.'"
Anglen says retelling the story engenders nausea.
"I was so revulsed. That moment just gels in your mind. I have no adjectives to describe how bad it was. I wanted to reach inside my body and pull my guts out and hose them off. I couldn't sleep for two nights, and then I got sick, which I attribute in part to lack of sleep."
Once he regained some composure that night and found sleep elusive, Anglen called the Miller Brewing Co. distributor in Springfield. Although it was 11 p.m., someone answered the phone and gave Anglen the telephone number for Miller's Milwaukee, Wisc., headquarters.
The next morning, a Miller representative told him to pack the bottle in dry ice and mail it to them, so "they could determine if it was a mouse," Anglen said.
"The first thing I said was, 'I'm an attorney, and that's the evidence."
The representative told Anglen that it might be a clump of algae in the bottle.
"I've never seen algae with four little feet and a tail and a head and gray fur," Anglen said.
Anglen called other beer companies including Coors to find out how they would handle such a situation. One company said they'd never faced this and had no procedures in place.
After more conversations with Miller officials, they gave Anglen the name of an expert in mouse identification. Anglen packed the bottle with mouse in dry ice and shipped it to Dr. William B. Jackson, professor emeritus of the Department of Biological Sciences at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Jackson said he thawed the critter which he identified as an adult male deer mouse. Photos of the autopsied mouse show blood-filled organs inside, which could indicate the mouse had not been pasteurized.
"That was my last hope for feeling good that at least it was a sanitized mouse," Anglen said.
dead or alive
Jackson identified a code on the bottle indicating it was brewed in Fort Worth, Texas, one of Miller's six breweries.
Company officials have not yet provided Jackson with information he has requested to determine conclusively whether the mouse entered the bottle alive or dead, he said.
"In each batch, as it's pasteurized, there's a record of what temperatures are achieved for how long," Jackson said.
"At this point, I'm waiting for more information as to how it had been treated, whether the normal length of heating had been followed and if there was any interruption of the process."
Jackson has done commercial analysis for companies and individuals "from either side of the fence" for decades.
He has testified in court in some cases, and has analyzed other beer-bottle mice, he said.
"This is not unique," Jackson said. Still, there's no reason the public should be alarmed.
"In general, the food and beverage supply in this country is very good," Jackson said. "Our food and drink is clean and pure."
Most of the problems he sees result from improper storage in an industrial situation or in the home, he said.
"If people don't close containers or don't maintain a clean environment, pests of various sorts can get into the food supply," Jackson said. "One case every now and then — while it's certainly potentially disagreeable — doesn't necessarily mean everything is dirty. Our manufacturers are doing a good job of maintaining a good food supply and should get credit for it."
Miller Brewing Company is taking a wait-and-see attitude — and so is Anglen.
While he's not out to get rich over the incident, he would like Miller to offer him an appropriate compensation for his emotional trauma, he said. He hasn't set a figure yet, he said.
On his side, Anglen has the evidence — the mouse — and the testimony of his wife.
Anglen said he thinks it's significant that the beer hissed with carbonation when he opened it and that it came from a sealed 18-pack box recently purchased. And Jackson told Anglen that the mouse had no broken bones.
But Anglen said he knows that his credibility will be tested.
"I'll do whatever they want including taking a lie-detector test," Anglen said. "They need to know that I've got other things to do besides hatching a scheme to defraud Miller by putting a mouse in my beer."
Faking it
Others apparently had nothing better to do.
On Mother's Day, a woman having lunch with her two sons at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Newport News, Va., reported to the wait staff that she had found a mouse in her vegetable soup. A necropsy found the mouse had died of a skull fracture before it entered the soup.
The woman subsequently asked for money in exchange for her 20-year-old son's confession that he put the mouse in the soup, according to The Nashville Tennessean.
The 36-year-old mother and her son were arrested and have been charged with attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit fraud.
Miller Brewing company spokesman Scott Bussen said large companies often deal with complaints.
"It's not uncommon to get someone every three or four months who claims to have found a mouse or something rodentlike in there," Bussen said.
"But when we do an analysis, it turns out it didn't happen here in any of our breweries. With any large company, people see an opportunity and assume the company will just write a check without looking into the legitimacy of the complaint."
Miller produces 40 million barrels of beer a year with each barrel filling 32 cases, Bussen said. There can be up to about a four-month window from packaging to sales, he said.
"Because of the way bottles are stored and how the brewing process works, it would be highly unlikely, but not impossible" for a mouse to get into a bottle, Bussen said. "It would take someone really wanting to mess around with it.
"If the mouse in question had undergone pasteurization," Bussen said, the company's experts say "there's no way ... the consumer would not taste the difference."
Bussen said they are eager to resolve this complaint.
"Our attorneys are trying to work out getting the package here," Bussen said.
"Hopefully, we can resolve this amicably pretty quickly."
For Anglen, the entire incident has one big saving grace:
"I won the lottery (in) that I was the one who got that bottle and not my wife," he said.
