Burned by Pipeworks batch numbers

It can happen to the best of us man. Especially with the codes where you need your little orphan Annie decoder ring to tell when the hell it was bottled.
A crummy commercial?! Son of a bitch.

 

Sorry to hear about that. NvU has been all cans lately & the last bomber run was back in early June. I'm not familiar with DG but looks like there is a Binny's there where you would have probably had better luck. If you can give them a review on BA to warn any future travelers.

 

That's unfortunate, but it's on you not Pipeworks.

 

It's on him that Pipeworks uses a horrible system for dating their beers?

 

*used* as I believe their bombers will be moving to date coding just as their cans now have. I believe I read that in the regular PW thread. Not faulting OP in any way but if I see any bottles with a cryptic batch number and I have no way to verify when the hell the batch was, I don't buy the beer (assuming it's an IPA or something where freshness matters somewhat). There are a few breweries in Illinois that I avoid because of this, such as Une Annee. To PW's credit, they have a page on their website with all their batch numbers & it has been kept up to date fairly well. The same cannot be said for other breweries. Lastly, I think Prestige takes the most blame in all of this anyway.

 

Well I may as well be honest and say I'm drinking a year and two week old bottle of Citra Pale by Knee Deep. I guess the last # of the date means something. 8-4-14... DOH!!! Second time this has happened to me. Got it at a very reputable shop in GR, very disappointed this was still on their shelves. This one was definitely on me ha-ha. I will say it's not undrinkable I guess. I'll wash it down with some Todd the Axeman to erase the memory.

 

Horrible system? Their website clearly lists the batch number and what was bottled on what date. I found it very easy to quickly ID when I was at a store of how fresh something was.

Now I may be different since I drink a lot of Pipeworks, so I'm constantly checking what's out and what's in the pipeline. But, if I see a beer on the shelf then I check the batch number, goto their site and see when it was bottled. Seems very simple and straightforward to me.

 

Wouldn't it be far more simple and straightforward to just print that date on the bottle?

 

Dude, you answered your own question with the rest of your post.

 

They are canning now and the date is printed on the bottom of the cans. Any NvU you buy in bombers now is old and should be avoided since the last few batches have been cans. It sucks that OP did not know this, but they have improved their system. OP just found an old bottle on the shelf.

 

Something I always did was look at the batch number of something I knew was their most recent bottling. If I knew "let me show you something" had just been bottled that week I would base all other beers off that number. Now, like someone said all will have regular dating though, and even with that on the PW thread there were some peopel saying they wanted batch number to stay and that they were going to miss it, guess its true you can never please everybody

 

Then you have to go find a calendar, figure out what all the numbers on it means...really confusing.

Batch numbers are totally where its at. You just have to have a smart phone with a data plan, cell coverage to get to the web, then google the site, then go to it, look through the list of codes and cross reference the code that is on the bottle you have to buy. Much easier than a date.

 

I went there once and will never go back. Visit a certain beer site that has menus and look at some of their pricing. "[Popular hyped beer] $.01"

 

Hey, PDUBS sales guy here, gonna start and try answering peoples questions or concerns every so often through the forum. That prestige is not one of our active accounts, we do not know how they got our beer, (more likely they bought it from another account and are flipping it themselves) we do not condone this and are looking into it. Thanks OP for sending us an email to alert us to this issue. As far as the batch number things go, date coders are super expensive, so we came up with an idea when we first started to help everyone have a fairly painless way to know the bottling dates while not investing into a crazy overpriced piece of machinery ^_^ we have a coder now, but it can only be used on the cans. Should have bottles figured out soon. Hope that clears a few things up for everyone.

 

When will we start seeing bombers again and beer outside of the can lineup? It's been said before but I find it pretty disappointing that the last time I visited my Lakeview Binny's, they literally had no Pipeworks except for Blood of the Unicorn cans. I used to be able to walk in there and pick and choose from at least a couple different bombers.

 

We can only produce 1 can variety and 1 bomber variety every week currently, this will hopefully change as we add more fermentation tanks, but for now that is the max we can produce each week. In regards to that binnys and our accounts in general, we are allocating them even higher volumes of beer than we were ever able to in past years thanks to the expansion, the beer is just selling at a much faster clip now than it was in previous years, that binnys specifically is one of our fastest selling accounts and we can barely keep up.