Trust the Best By date

But they don't say that - in most cases they, as you note, use language like "Best by/before" or "Enjoy by"... Even those wth "pull dates" have to assume that someone buying the beer on that day will not (always) consume it by midnight.

But do you really think that 6 weeks ago it would have been all that much better? The European brands that typically have date codes exactly one year (imagine that? Sometimes even longer ) from packaging are basing it on, as MillerCoors says, "logistics" rather than taste.

 

How about the retailer? I'd be up in his face for selling out-of-date product. (and just wait until you hear the myriad of responses to that observation!)

 

Will any of them be in Latin?

(Coincidentally, that was the name of a little red-headed young woman/exchange student we had in the 10th grade. I had a big crush on her, but --- you too, too shy...)

 

Even the Best Buy dates imo are overly optimistic; See Jever.

 

Pig Latin.

 

The best by dates do not account for what happens to a beer between the brewery and your refrigerator. An import might go by truck from a brewer to a shipper's warehouse (possibly a distributor in between) then sit in a container for a indeterminate amount of time. Where the container ends up in the boat and where the beer ends up in the container can have a big impact on the temperatures the beer will suffer on its voyage. Then it will sit in a container on a dock, then a shipper's warehouse, get trucked to a distributor, sit in a distributor's warehouse, then get trucked to a retailer where it sits on a shelf and waits for you to find it.

 

Doesn’t Kostritzer use a best by date that is one year out from bottling?

 

When the manufacturer takes the extra step of including a bottling/canning date and a best by date, these are often a full year apart (I currently have some Sixpoint Gose that follows that convention).

The word for that in Latin is stercus tauri, although the connotation for the Romans was substantially different: they would have only seen it as a desirable form of fertilizer.

 

I drank a Serbian DIPA that has best before August 2020! That's over a 1 year window.

 

On imported beers it’s safest to assume that the best by date is a year from bottling.

 

"One year" ? From US breweries? Not from what I've seen. Much more common, for most styles of beers of "standard" abv that one expects to consume fresh, the brewers' "best by" date/recommended shelf life periods are usually 3-6 months. That's the case for AB, MillerCoors, Pabst (brewed by MC), Boston Beer Co., Yuengling, Sierra Nevada --- on down.

Don't know what's going on with that Sixpoint beer you have, but I'd say that is very unusual, even for Sixpoint.

 

Not at all often for US breweries unless the beer is intended to also be sold in Europe.

 

Part of the canning run is to be shipped to Europe for sale there.

 

I have no idea how to post a picture on the Forum, but I am looking at a can of Sixpoint Jammer (Brooklyn, NY). Canned on 02 April 2019, BB 01 April 2020.

 

Are you Charlie Brown?