Ballast Point bottle dating?

Yeah good luck with that. I have passed on many an IPA from BP because the date is so mangled. The only one I have found recently was a bomber and it was quite clearly marked that it was bottled in 2014

 

Every bottle Ive bought from BP had a white date printed on the label just right from the beer's name. Fairly easy to read but commonly a bit smudged.

 

Yes, their bottle dates generally suck-Julian dates that look like those Captcha images on websites that prove your not a bot. They also can have the white lettering over the white parts of the label. Annoying at best, unreadable at worst.

The cans are dated quite nicely on the outside of the package, though.

 

Just picked up some Victory at Sea last night, the date on every bottle of the 6 pack is illegible. I don't understand how they don't have a machine that can do this properly and how they think it is acceptable to continue to print this illegible date on the bottle. This whole bottle dating thing is maddening. Maybe with the $1 billion they can figure how to properly date bottles.

 

http://imgur.com/ZnotqDs

http://imgur.com/XN4f6J7

 

Trying to read Ballast Point bottle dates has gotten more and more difficult.

 

I've passed on many a BP beer, because the dating was either illegible or just not there at all.
I really dislike Julian dating on the bottle too, which is another reason why I pass on Lagunitas frequently.
Perhaps it will change for the better with the big buy-out/sell-out!

 

Their format is year followed by the Julian date. For example 15205 is day 205 of year 2015. Like almost all of us, I prefer the standard format xx/xx/xx.

 

BP's bottling dates are very clear using the Julian system on their VAS. Haven't really looked for it on others.

 

At $12 to $15 for a sixer, dates mean nothing. Too many other great brews to worry with BP. As long as we, the public, keep buying, they won't change. And a good morning to all.

 

I just had a VAS that was a year old and was still awesome. I can't find another case since the billion $ buyout. My beer guy says he has had a run on this beer and can't get more right now. Hope to get a case or two before the buyout is complete.

Enjoy

 

90% of the time any 12 oz Sculpin or Grunion bottle the date is smudge
or unreadable (my recent experience). That's why I stick to Sculpin cans. Date is perfect on the box.

Now getting super fresh Sculpin... The pains of being a west coast IPA fan living in
NJ.

 

Ballast Point uses a YYDOY format whereas YY is year and DOY is Day Of Year.
This is shown below the Brew/Batch Code:

http://www.ballastpoint.com/date-stamp-guide/

Unfortunately it's never very clear and you'll need to bring reading glasses or look at several bottles to find one that is legible.

 

Most people can and have learned to deal with the julian date formatting, the issue with most BP bottles is that the date is unreadable. It is 1) either not stamped 2) smeared or partially stamped 3) stamped on top of another part of the label and unreadable

 

Amen about Lagunitas. I would buy them twenty times more often if they had a clearly readable and non-Julian dated bottling date.

 

I just can't understand why they use Julian dating. Makes no sense to me. If I'm looking to get a great IPA and I have to first find the date and then look up what hell the date is I'm off to the next IPA.

I like their stuff and get it from time to time, but as everyone else has said, there are way too many good IPA's to deal with that.

 

I can usually read the BP (better than most)
It's funny I wonder if it's worth it in the long run for the brewer if the beers are past their prime but the label is unreadable

 

Have gotten tired of finding old stock and smudged dates on BP products (in the Dallas, Texas area) and seldom bother to even look at their beers. The only BP that I've had this year was Grapefruit Sculpin.

 

It seems to have gotten progressively worse with GF sculpin and regular Sculpin. BP just got into NM in May so my experience has been limited. But it went from me pulling out a bottle and looking at the bottom right of the art label and seeing it quite legible, albeit a bit small. Then it seemed like half of the bottles had dates that were squished together. So I had to pretty much pull out every bottle of a sixer to see what was going on. Then they all started to look not just squished, but they overlapped #s and it appeared smudged.. Now I will be lucky to find a bottle that even has a date. All this for a beer that is seemingly overpriced. Cans have been the way to go for me, but it seems like now the distributor is sending old stuff NMs way. I went from drinking a 2 month old can to going back to same store and getting a 3 month old can just two days later.

I think it's a packaging/mechanical issue. Locally two breweries have canning stamps on the bottom of their cans. Both seem to have half their cans either spread out too much, on the ring of the can so it's angled weird, or squished. They spend all this money on stuff that eventually doesn't work. Maybe BP gave up on it if it was just squished all the time.