Weihenstephan Cans!!!

See -- they confiscated all his electronic devices too!

 

As the brewers would prefer, I’m sure they don’t like they’re collective skills being judged by 8 month old product.

 

When I get my hands on this it’s going into my dimpled mug. Once you got your second half liter you can pick up all the subtleties

 

Purely money if you talking about putting it on a boat and then it has to clear customs, then it starts it’s long journey to your shelf. I’d say at best getting it into your system in under 4 months might be really hard to beat on a a consistent basis. If they put 6 month limits on it they’d pay for the shipping and then they’d pay to buy their beer back. Just a reasonable guess. All the Jever I’ve ever seen was over 15 months old.

 

I doubt it was delivered 15 months old. This is where your "purely money" theory shines -- they price it too damned high that it sits on shelves. Don't even bother to look at Augustiner.

 

Well the dates are quite arbitrary, as their no industry standards to be met except what the brewery puts on the bottle. If you started putting 6 month old dates on imported beers the breweries would be buying a shit ton of beer back, and losing money.

 

Yup!

It is not the brewers that establish a 12+ month best by date. It is the finance/accounting guys at the brewery making this happen.

Cheers!

 

More precisely (as I understand it) it is the Wholesale Distributor who would 'bite the bullet' here but based upon the plethora of old beer I see on my beer retailers shelves (e.g., beers beyond their best by dates) these beers just sit on the beer retailers' shelves until some customer who doesn't know (or care) to check dates buys the old product.

I have heard beer industry people opine that some Wholesale Distributors 'influence' the importing breweries to utilize long (e.g., 12+ month) best by durations. The concept being they will refuse to purchase beer with shorter (e.g., 6 month) durations since they don't want to have to deal with complaints from the beer retailers. I do not know how much this aspect influences things.

And while Jever does indeed have a too long best by duration of 15 months they fairly recently (a couple of years ago?) added the packaging date as well so it makes is easy to understand how old those beers are. I have not found any Jever beers less than 6 months old in a couple of years (i.e., the last time I purchased a six-pack).

Cheers!

 

That’s the problem with distributors, it’s strictly money and in this case the commodity is beer. If they can hustle food thru imports why can’t they expedite beer, which is kind of a food product. If you ever question why for a million different questions, money would be the primary answer in most of them.

 

You are indeed correct the fundamental issue is money. The Wholesale Distributor will utilize the rationale that old beer does not present a health risk (or similar argument) so people drinking old beer are not at risk of harm (or whatever).

The distributing beer industry has several elements of the supply chain: Brewery -> Wholesale Distributor -> Beer Retailer. The element that should be most concerned about beer freshness/quality is the brewery since if a customer gets old product and because the beer is stale that customer thinks that Brewery A produces crappy beer they will choose to never buy Brewery A's beer again. The only brewery that I know of who is conscientiously responsive to beer freshness/quality is AB. They insist (and monitor compliance) that their partner Wholesale Distributors remove old product from beer retailers shelves. All of the craft/import breweries do not take equivalent measures to the best of my knowledge.

I have opined in many BA threads that the topic of beer freshness/quality is something the Brewers Association should more proactively address. The Brewers Association does generate documents and conducts training in this regard but with all of the old craft (and imported) beer on my local beer retailers shelves these measures are not 'working'.

FWIW I have been buying more and more locally produced beers since I can find these beers fresh, often less than a month from packaging. Perhaps if more beer consumers did likewise the distributing and importing breweries would have to take proactive and genuine measures to improve their ability to provide fresh product on beer retailers shelves?

Cheers!

 

Back in the day the Born On Date sounded irrelevant right? At least to me. Why and what is this? A gimmick? They were on track before most knew there was a track. If distributors wanted to fast track the beer I. Sure they could, grease the wheels a bit, it’s business right? Beers big business you would think there would be a solution to this import mess.

 

OK, let me ask you a question: Do you think that the Wholesale Distributors think there is a business problem here? They order beer from the breweries and sell those beers to beer retailers. A situation of product in and product out. Do you think the Wholesale Distributors give a 'rats ass' about beer freshness/quality (other than for AB products since they have terms and conditions in their contract with AB)?

If you reach the conclusion that the Wholesale Distributors do not see a business problem here, which business(es) do you think will conscientiously fix this problem?

Cheers!

 

No, they don’t. The distributors don’t suffer here the retailers do, so what might they care?

Seems like they would tap the other continent for money to fast track the product. A perfect double play.

 

I've seen it at a few places now in Metro West. It's about at good as I've had here, only better when I had it at the brewery in Freising. Can date was 11/19/20, like the helles.

 

US Brewers, especially the local brewers, have been promoting the superiority of "brewery fresh" beer as well as date coding their beers for many decades before AB's "Born On" promotion.
Beer Freshness and Date Coding
Anyone interested in the subject would have come across the info in ads, articles, books or just chatting with retail store and distributor employees.

Funny, @steveh and I were having an off-line conversation about this and it got me wondering how and where I first learned about beer freshness and date codes. I know there was a Pabst promo book I came across in the 1970s and did some more probing of my brewing library and found a couple of more sources I read nearly 50 years ago:

Well, if a beer doesn't sell at the retail level, the retailer doesn't order more, so the distributor loses potential sales and whatever stock they maintain becomes out-of-code and must be destroy. By contract in many cases (and dependent on state and Federal laws) it is typically the wholesale distributor who pays for the old beer to be removed/replaced/destroyed at both the retail and wholesale level.

I've read about non-AB distributor/brewery lawsuits over the topic, read brewery contracts that require it, witnessed MC and other distributors removing old beer and had distributors replace old stock that wasn't AB products. Retailers and their employees have noted it in posts here on BA. Do some distributors ignore the requirement, pressure retailers, etc? Sure - few companies like to lose money. But that's no different than any other aspect of business and why it is written into the contracts. Are too many small breweries extended to the point that they are unable to monitor their distributors? Yeah. Do some states' franchise laws make it difficult and costly for small brewers to leave poor-performing distributors who don't obey the contracts? Oh, yeah.