Well, I suppose there's a line between a beer that just "tastes bad" and one that (like, say that greenish-tinged bologna in the bottom drawer of the fridge) is "bad". Either one = "Bad purchase" (but the former won't sicken ya).
(Emphasis above in this copy of post #1 is mine.) Just a reminder of the intent of this thread. Everyone, please go to the thread linked below to discuss general topics about German beers. https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/introduction-to-german-beer.657866/
Picked up a 4 pack of this Pinkus beer and the code is 91139N1. Not the Julian code, not really sure what it is. Googled numerous ways. Thanks-
Maybe so, I thought German brewers had to put a date code somewhere on the bottle. That is the only number. Makes me not want to buy German beer. Most of it around here is expired.
https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...ed-usa-german-beer.658248/page-3#post-7300770 Not sure if it’s here or not but it would be a good bet to try. It would also be worth your time to post the code in this thread and someone will more than likely be able to help you. Cheers.
Ive find this to vary quite drastically from store to store. Some places move imports better than others in my experience. If you’re in south jersey wegmans cherry hill does a pretty good job moving them qui As @BigIronH said there is a whole thread with all the codes you need.
Domestically, they do, but I don't think that extends to exported beer. I've seen pictures of export bottles before that lacked the German best-by date and bottling dates are pretty much unheard of in Germany. EDIT: The opposite is also true, by the way. Sometimes exported bottles will have date codes that will tell you the bottling date, but the domestic bottles do not carry these, only a best-by date.
Isn't Pinkus imported by Merchant-DuVin? They're notorious for not sharing dates on any beers. FWIW -- not *all* German breweries are so vague.
Actually the very next day Merchant DuVin replied with an exact expiration date. It expires next month, but definitely too much work to see something so mundane
Can you show us their answer so we can all learn from their info? Or was it a very vague, high level answer?
I’m guessing this Tucher is April 13, 2020. But it does have a question mark, so… This is a nice beer too. A bit more bitterness than usual, and it has an ever so slight stale taste, but really enjoyable.
Not really a secret, Aug,20 2021 was the response I got. They also inquired where I purchased the beer. No way to confirm this but the pils tasted fresh-
There have been some reminders in the 2-3 current forum threads regarding Octoberfest beers about checking the date codes on the imports, so here's a bump to this thread that gives you the tools to decipher those codes that are not straight-forward. If you discover errors in the info or have a translation of a brewery code that isn't in this thread, please post an update. (But keep it code-related to allow this thread to remain direct to the code topic.)
weltenburger USA got back to me and said that code means 4/29/19 bottling date. So I see 119th day of 2019 was 4/29 but I have no clue how they got year 2019.
Nice info to share. Looking at some reviews on Weltenburger in the BA DB where date stamps were added, seems it's possibly the letter which corresponds to the year. c 2011 e.g., 257C1056 d 2012 e 2013 f 2014 g 2015 h 2016 i 2017 j 2018 k 2019 The format might then be DDDYHHMM.
