Julian Calendar dating. Why?

This topic is so...... 2014. Back then this was maddening with some of my favorite beers from Lagunitas, Ballast Point , Green Flash to name a few the worst offenders with bottle dating.With the explosion of local craft breweries in my area, I almost never buy off the shelf beer so don't need to worry about this any more. Lagunitas especially, impossible to read dates, screw them, if they don't care about me as a customer, I don't care about them.

 

This. I see so many YDDD date formats in 80 character cards on a weekday basis it is second nature to me.

 

The great thing about not caring about IPA's is that I mostly don't have to care about bottle dating either. Mostly.

 

The dating equipment may be retrofitted from something totally unrelated to beer dating. As stated by @Hayden34 anything that's not designed to be on a shelf at Wal Mart, is quite likely to use a sequential/Julian dating system.

Also lots of breweries go bargain shopping when buying dating kit as they see it as unnecessary or 'an extra' for their customers (non-essential) and it's way cheaper to program something that just has 6 or 8 digits (with or without a clock time) rather than extra details like MONTH/DAY where you have to know which month has which amount of days. Think alarm clock level complexity!

 

I only look at dates after I drink the beer as its all part of the adventure... In my experience beer never goes bad it just produces a different flavor

 

I have absolutely no sympathy for this argument.

If the brewery is so small they can't afford automatic dating equipment, then pre-print years and months on the edges of the labels and notch them for each month's production.

The "complexity" problem can be solved by the electronics in a $9.95 alarm clock, why is it beyond the capability of brewery production equipment?

 

Yeah, but you also probably state time in terms like Oh Dark Thirty!

 

And in the US there are German brewed beers (e.g., delicate lagers) that have 12 month (and for the case of Jever 15 month) best by dates. What do those German breweries use for beers in the German market?

Cheers!

 

I use that phrase at LEAST once a week. Probably because I have to get up around that time every day! I also always use the 24 hour clock. It saves a lot of confusion.

 

Julian Dates have been used in the manufacturing of a whole lot of food and other products for a long, long time - now that technology is so far along, regular dates are being used more and more. But a lot of times it's a Best By Date, which is completely arbitrary - brewers can set whatever length they feel, vary it however they please (based on style, ship-to location, etc.), and change it if they want - especially since beer doesn't really expire but just changes from what was originally intended.

Generally speaking, Julian Dates are always canned on or bottled on dates. Rather have that than Best By Dates that still don't let you know when it was canned or bottled.

 

I thought that perhaps they might be different. For example Sierra Nevada utilizes a best by date of 150 days (assuming cool/cold storage) for their beers like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. When they export SNPA to Europe they use a longer best by date (1 year I believe). It is not like the beers they send to Europe have a 'better' shelf life; they simply put on a longer timeframe because of the realities of extended distribution.

Cheers!

 

I see some beers from the UK, when they have dates, use a 12 month window as well.

 

Have been listening to several podcast with brewers regarding the upside down independence label, and most of those commented that they would rather see the BA push brewers to put dates on their beer rather than an independence symbol. Only takes a person getting an old, undated beer with this symbol to question the whole independence thing. I don't mind the julian dating, in IT so not a big deal, it actually requires less intelligence for a machine to calculate.

 

I too have read that German breweries utilize a 12 month best by date for their beers. In my opinion that duration of time is crazy for a Pale Lager. Anheuser-Busch gets very little appreciation from BAs but there is no doubt in my mind that the folks of AB have the epitome of QA/QC in the brewing of their beers (and the distribution system as well). A beer like Budweiser has a best by duration of 110 days and when beers reach that date at retailers the local Wholesale Distributors remove those beers.

What I do when I see German brewed Pale Lagers on my retailers shelves I look at the best by dates and if the beer is over 6 months old I refuse to purchase those beers. Frankly I would prefer to use an even shorter timeframe like 4 months of age but if I did this I would likely never purchase German brewed beer.

Cheers!

 

If you are not good at math, or need to know the date (add a day after Feb 28th for leap years).. take a picture of this with your camera. Text the pic to a contact/family member that you rarely text, and then lock it so you can't delete it.

[ I'm usually not this ambitious, but I'm off today, it's snowing and I'm bored ]

 

Or a Google Image search for "Day of the year" calendar turns up dozens of them, as well.

 

Every time this topic comes up for discussion, we get a plethora of responses along the lines of "can't you do simple arithmetic in your head"?

Well, that's not the point, is it? If a brewery pretends Julian code dating is for consumers, they are lying (or being lazy).

Not to mention there are numerous formats for the Julian date code used by the different brewers. Some bury the code in a long manufacturing string of a dozen or more letters and numbers. Some use letters to represent the year. Some use letters to represent the month. Some use letters to represent the day of the week. One uses an obscure letter code for month.

So, you see a string of 17 letters and numbers... exactly WHICH number do you divide by 30? Hmmmm?