ODell Brewing can’s question

Most consumers don't really care about their beer being canned yesterday. They want to know if it's still any good. A best by date serves that purpose. Random Joe Bob sees a canned on date 6 weeks ago and he doesn't have the slightest clue if that's fresh, old, or somewhere in between. He certainly knows that Best by 12/10/18 is good per the brewery's own recommendation, though.
The "it's too old if it's from last week" posse might get irked by that, but they're only going to buy your beer once before moving on to their next conquest anyway.

 

Beer changes from the moment it’s canned/bottled. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. As a consumer who is buying the beer I’d like to be the judge on when I drink the beer. Especially if it’s an IPA, I don’t want a brewery telling me their beer is still good “x” amount of months after it’s been packaged. I’ll make that judgement on my own. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I’d rather drink an IPA that’s within 6-8 weeks old as opposed to 4-6 months. Like I said before, if your beer is sitting on shelves for that long you have bigger issues.

 

You said you wanted a reason for best by date and I gave you one. I get that you want to make up your own mind about whether something is old or not. Casual consumers don't have any idea what is old or not. They simply want to be told if something is still good, and Odell is doing that for them. They're also helping out the distributor and even all of those random ass little liquor stores that wouldn't know an IPA from a bottle of Captain Morgan. Is it still good? The can tells you. There are way more people that don't have a clue about what is "fresh" or not vs. someone who knows the specific date range of IPAs that they enjoy more.

The brewery is selling a product they know pretty well. Hopefully better than you and me and everyone else on here. They're deeming it to be good within a specific date range. If they really felt it fell off after a certain date, it would certainly benefit them to back that date off. The QA/QC at a many larger places is staggering. I know what kind of tasting panels and labs they're using. If they really felt something was falling off and they'd lose more consumers than they'd gain, they wouldn't sell it.

 

To add to what Domingo said, and this should be common knowledge, the best by date works for me as long as the product is stored optimally; in the cooler. If cooler space reached critical mass and you're looking at something on a warm shelf, best by flies out the window.

 

How many “casual consumers”/ “Random Joe Bobs” have you seen at the store looking for dates on cans/bottles? I frequent a couple of high traffic/popular beer stores in Denver on a regular basis and have never once seen a person looking for a date on the beer. Not to say that doesn’t happen at all but I’m pretty confident that the majority of people who are looking at dates are the beer geeks on these forums and other sites which make up a very small percentage of craft beer drinkers. I guess we’ll agree to disagree.

 

Your book clearly doesn’t include the chapter about how great their canning line and process is.

Literally just found a year old Myrcenary in the back of my fridge a couple weeks ago and seriously couldn’t tell it was a year old. It showed almost zero signs of deterioration. Even the aromatics were fully there.

Maybe other breweries have pushed the freshness narrative because they don’t have a great process like Odell?!

I think you’ll be fine.

 

At one point Green Flash supposedly had nailed their packaging down to the point where they could last a year and still be within their QA/QC limits. That's per a tasting panel and lab analysis. They didn't ever publicly push that narrative, but they were confident that they could. There's a big difference between what the large scale regional and national breweries can do vs. places selling hand packaged tallboys.

 

@JeremyDanner care to elaborate on why Boulevard uses both canned / bottled on as well as best by?

 

Don’t hate this idea.
Maybe it’s due to the fact they feel different beers of theirs decline at vastly different rates. I know that is a fairly simplistic explanation, but I think it could go a long way in helping consumers in their decision process.

 

That seems like an ideal situation if it's easy to do.

 

We include both because we feel that it's important to let folks know when a beer was packaged, but we also share a best by date to indicate a shelf life that's been determined by tasting our beer as it ages in ideal/not so ideal conditions.

 

Contact the brewery. They're the absolute best folks to ask a question like this.