How to get fresh beer on tap?

Open up your own bar or work at one.

 

OP, there is little you can do as a consumer to ensure your draft beer is fresh other than patronizing bars that you know move through kegs fairly quickly and receive timely allocations of beer. It's a common misconception that draft beer is automatically more fresh than packaged and this simply is not true.

 

I mean, you can always casually ask the bartender "oh hey, how long have you guys had (beer x) on tap?"

 

Easy and best answer to this - spend a lot of time at the bar

 

I don't know if they still do, but Avenue Pub in New Orleans used to put "Tapped On" dates on the menu next to a lot of their hoppy beers. Maybe start pushing this initiative and encouraging others to follow?

 

That's the only way to have a reasonable idea of how old beers might be. If you know a bar rotates taps, and they've had the same beer for a month, you know it probably isn't extremely fresh.

Or just ask the bartender how old each beer is, but that would get annoying pretty quickly.

 

Tapped dates don't really mean anything in the grand scheme of when the beer was kegged though. You could tap a keg of Sculpin this morning and it wouldn't mean shit if it was kegged a year ago.

 

Yeah for sure.

Too Hops in NYC (bar/store) has a "tapped" date on their chalkboard menu. And ive been to one or two other places that do this. If all bars adopted this practice that would be cool

 

Totally true. But all else being equal I'd rather drink something that was tapped a day ago vs a month ago.

 

As someone who's managed bars, this usually won't do you any good. Kegs are very, very rarely dated, and even if the bar got the keg in that same day, it could have been sitting in the distributor's warehouse for weeks, or even months, and there's absolutely no way for the bartender, let alone management, to know that. I've seen plenty of brand new kegs that have been way past their prime.

 

But, if it's a beer that have on fairly regularly, it doesn't tell you how long that keg has been on.

 

Really the only thing you can do is ask the bartender how fresh the keg is. Even if you know they just tapped a keg, who knows how long that keg has been sitting around before they tapped it?

 

It's a start, man. If you trust the establishment, you trust that they have proper keg rotation. However, you are correct if you're implying that the issue stems from the distributor because I've heard of instances where non-fresh kegs have been delivered to bars. For example, a bar near me received a half-barrel of Enjoy By 12.26.14 on 12/27. Lame.

 

TapHunter

The app on your phone shows you draft lists at bars. It shows which ones are new in green font. It shows you when the bar owner updated their tap list. And, you can configure it to get updates when your favorite bars add a new beer. You can also have it update you when certain beers that you like are just tapped somewhere in town.

I'm drinking a lot of day 1 just tapped IPAs lately.

 

At bars I request a sample taste of hoppy beers before ordering them. Sometimes I order a pint of the sampled beer (i.e., it tastes fresh) and sometimes I don't (i.e., it doesn't taste fresh or I don't like the hop profile). If the bartender asks me what I think of the beer when I didn't order it I provide honest feedback: it tastes old, I don't really like the hops used in that beer, etc.).

Cheers!

 

I just follow my local Pub on social media as they usually post each new keg as they tap it. This is also probably a good way to keep their regulars coming back more often.

 

Could always ask for sample before you order it.

 

Eli Cannon's in Connecticut has always listed the tap date on their tap list. Of course there is no telling when the brewery put it in that keg.

 

A lot of bars in Portland put Digital Pour up on their taplist so you can see where the level of the keg is at similar to the list below. Which will usually tell you how long it has been on or not. It's also nice if you're going for a specific beer, you can be almost certain that it'll be on once you get there!