Is Bottle Dating Really THAT Difficult?

As someone who works in food safety, I get what your saying, but in this case not dating at all would increase the potential exposure to a hazard to all product still on the shelves. Also, though not completely foolproof, most companies that date code product have numerous quality checks in place to ensure the coding is accurate when produced.

 

Not coding does not necessarily imply that there is nothing, but you are correct in that not coding doesn't help recall and traceabilty. I as well work in food safety/food manufacturing. The quality checks do help immensely, and ironically get easier to miss the more automated the process becomes.

I am all for coding, and think it should be mandatory for all consumable products.

 

The Krones line at Sierra Nevada had a large stack of labels that were fed in. There are YouTube videos online showing that.

 

Simple. You can't have out of date beers returned to you, if there are no dates to exceed. When a brewery use a confusing dating code or none at all, what they are saying is, "Our desire to not buy beer back exceeds our desire to make sure our customer gets a quality product every time."

Personally, when a company sends me such a message, I reply with a message of my own by leaving it on the shelf.

 

So they might be though in this case they coincide. My point was that all those issues of cost, time etc apply equally to the EU brewers and they don't seem to cause any difficulties at all.

 

In the world of scale and what breweries use to get this date on your bottle. It's either that, or something which costs $20 and someone can fit in their pocket on their way to where the Meheen is.
On the low side for a 25k a barrel year operation that unit is about 9k of money for something that might or might not work all the time, and unless you're paying next to nothing per square foot on your lease, or have been there forever and probably own it; what Sierra Nevada is probably using would probably be an 80k investment.

 

There is an old saying of: if there is a will there is a way.

The breweries could readily date their beers if they have the will to do it.

It could be as simple as the early Sam Adams ‘solution’: labels and a cheap band saw.

A bit more expensive solution of an ink jet printer.

And other solutions.

When a brewery decides to not implement a date system for their beers their message to me is: we really do not care to date our beers. My message back to them is: I will not purchase your beer.

Based upon a number of posts in this thread (and other related threads) there are a number of other beer consumers that agree with me and refuse to purchase non-dated beer. Each brewery that chooses to not date their beer gets to decide whether these lost sales are worthwhile to them.

Cheers!

 

Depends on the buying habits of the consumer. I tend to buy all my seasonals close to if not immediately after their release making bottling dates a fairly moot point for me.

Edit: Huh. Read your reply again. I think you misread his post as "sessionable" instead of "seasonable" which I'm assuming he meant as seasonal.

 

All of their redesigned labels have a very clear spot near the bottom with a best by date (or best after for the reserve series), and at this point if you're still seeing the old labels it means the beer is at least 4 months old and you probably don't want it any way.

I don't think I have ever seen an Epic bomber with an actual date. It's always some bullshit batch #, which requires you to go on their website, navigate through three pages of bullshit to get to that particular beer, and then hope they've actually updated it recently so that your batch is included in the list.

 

Another reason their ballsy titling of "Enjoy By" is great, is because it makes the casual beer consumer aware of the fact that freshness matters. As passionate beer lovers on this website, we know it does, but your average Joe does not.

But when they see this giant "ENJOY BY" slapped on this IPA, and see that the date is not far off from the current date, they may realize that freshness does matter. And maybe they'll think twice about purchasing another company's product that lacks a date.

 

Bottle dating isn't a matter of difficulty. Bottle dating is a matter of whether each individual brewer sees enough benefit in it to justify the time and expense.

Try to keep in mind that your average craft consumer is not a "Beer Advocate." (I don't mean to make BA sound like an elitist term. I'm just using it as a method of differentiation for the purposes of this particular post.) Most craft consumers still go into a grocery or big box store and grab a sixer or 12 pack of whatever craft they choose and pay absolutely no attention to dating. I see it every day. It's almost the same at bottle shops, albeit a little less so. There are on average more vigilant consumers at those locations. The point being, a Beer Advocate who puts a premium on dating and freshness is still very much in the minority of craft consumers.

If fellow Beer Advocates want dating to become more ubiquitous then do yourself and others a favor and pass along the importance of dating and freshness to a craft consumer who has yet to see the light, or date as it were. Just be sure to do it in the most palatable way possible. It's easy for something like this to come off as snobbish.

If you want more breweries to date their products then more consumers need to recognize and stress the importance of it and, most importantly, vote with their dollars.

 

Bingo! We have a winner! If it could be proved that bottle dating increased sales everyone would do it.

 

Bottle dating is good, putting the date on the label is even better. FW and SN are doing it the right way now. It's time for some others to step up to the plate.

 

And that is why I have always respected Sam C's process

 

Carling-National (and many other breweries) was using "Sam C's process" of notching the bottling date back when Calagione was still in the Cub Scouts - not sure if they had to pay a royalty to him. Jim Koch, though an adapter of the method, hardly invented it.

 

Good info, and I assumed so, but was just appreciate that DFH dates their goods. As I am one of those ppl that must know when a beer was made haha

 

Yep, and I think @HeislerGold nailed on on WHY.

Mainstream consumers are to blame, and his explanation above strikes me as right on target.

 

I just bought some Anchor Lager and can't even find the Julian code, nevermind figuring it out. It's sad when tiny local breweries don't even have enough beer to supply more than a few bars bars but have a better, consumer-friendly bottle dating system than the some of the biggest craft breweries in the country.