My former go-to (a two-location local liquor superstore) has over the last year cut its once-impressive craft/import inventory by 30-40%. During that time, a lot of old inventory got older, and the variety of “new arrivals” was scaled back. I stopped in last week for the first time in a month and, wow! Seemed as if another 15-20% of the craft shelf space had been given over to the usual suspects (craft cocktails/seltzers/ciders). While I looked hard for something that piqued my interest, an employee was walking up and down the long beer aisle, pulling even more stuff off the shelves. I noticed he was randomly removing the parcels of like product (for example, reducing the number of Pseudo Sue 4-packs from 10 to 4). Knowing this store’s inconsistent “rotation discipline,” I checked some dates of product left on the shelf against the date of product on the pull cart. Yep, some of the new(er) stock got pulled, leaving the out-of-date stuff for the customers. That’s on the store. Back near the import shelves, I came across a stack of seven cases of various brands newly delivered by the distributor. Under the Heineken and Modelo cases, I was elated to see a case of HB Maibock. It was, of course, too good to be true, as my eyes focused on a best before date of the previous week. Is that on the distributor…or the store for being indifferent about the age of incoming product? Either way, I’ll no longer visit this retailer with much hope of walking out with a haul. I left empty-handed.
Old beer is old beer. Time was, however, I wouldn’t pass up a variety pack like that. Even at the six month mark.
It's the only time I have seen a beer store remove a production date on their beers, but you would be surprised how many stores keep ipa beers for more than two years on their shelves. I can understand the reason behind it, it's all about money, and it's true that it's up to us to be cautious about it, but it's also the responsibility to the owner to manage his store by knowing his customers if he thinks he can't sell some types of beers.
I'm pretty sure that everyone on this thread is pretty date-consious when buying beer. I would guess that 80%+ of the buying public NEVER looks at beer dates. (That statement is based on a gut feel with no data to back it up). I admit to personally failing to look at dates in about 5-10% of my purchases. Either I'm in a hurry, or I have learned to trust the brewery-distributor-store combination. Sometimes I just know that a certain beer was very recently introduced. As far as stores obscuring date codes- This should be illegal and maybe in some places it is. If only we small percentage of "advocates" refuse to purchase these date-obsured products I don't think there are enough of us to "teach the store a lesson". At least we avoid paying for old beer.
I always laugh when I see stores that have Stone Enjoy By that's past its date. I've seen it a couple years old and I find that hilarious.
I agree with the impossible to read sentiment. Fat Heads is one of my favorites and its a big seller and fresh @ 3-4 weeks from canning in West-Pa. The problem is they date their cans on the bottom rim on the can and not the flat part and it can be difficult to read especially the month.
Seen plenty of old beer in stores but nothing with dates intentionally removed. I’ve often had problems reading dates stamped or etched on the neck of bottles.
What you do is take the loss and manage your inventory better next time. Discount the beer a month before its best-by date (or three/six months after its canning date, as applicable by style) if you don't want to risk it sitting past that.
This reminds me of a story from probably 30 years ago now. I knew these guys that had a bearing supply company. One of their customers insisted on only buying bearings that were made in the US. These bearing guys would sit around sanding off the “made in China “stamp on the bearings for that particular customer.
Here’s another “creative” method to deal with date-conscious consumers. A very solid brewer in my state still prints the “packaged on” type on its preprinted can labels. Yet in the last year, it has stopped printing an actual date under the heading when it cans its products. The effect on me? I no longer purchase its beers.
The local Kroger-brand supermarket was unloading Oktoberfest beer at Christmas, obviously some months old. But for Sam Adams and Paulaner at $5.20 a sixer? quite drinkable and I'd hate to see it wasted!
Most of the BB dates for Paulaner and H-P were April of 2026 last season -- I'd have snapped up a few of those at that price!
That's outrageous and stupid. It's outrageous because it's essentially lying to potential customers. It's stupid because people who check dates are beer nerds and beer nerds will know when something is up with dates. Fuck that store.
As said previously, most of the retailers (and their employees) I talk to don't know a thing about Best By dates or codes. So who knows what the guy was pulling? I think it depends on how distribution works where you live. It was, in fact, HB Maibock I found a few years ago that was the previous year's stock being dropped by the area distro (before HB was using clear BB dating). I mentioned it to one retail department head and he shrugged his shoulders, so I walked. About a week later I was in another branch of the same retailer and saw the same stock of old HB and pointed it out to that department head and the guy jumped all over it -- checking his info on his computer, confirming the HB date codes, then calling the distro to have him come remove the old stock and bring him fresh. So yeah, it all depends, but I would still make the effort to point out the old stock to the retailer.
That's a talk to the manager type issue of getting their staff to have basic understanding how rotating stock actually works. Distributors also have (plenty of) stock they routinely are not getting out on the shelves. Maibocks have a narrow release time window for a buyers general interest. Not surprising there is old stock of it showing up, or that a store like that may have one sticking around.
Sitting around in the store I can *sort of* understand (sort of), but the incidents I mentioned above were stacks of cases brought from the distro's warehouse and dropped as new stock. Very cheeky.
I hear and agree with you both @steveh and @MostlyNorwegian. At this particular store, I had two separate discussions with store personnel (not management, which is hardly ever around) about old stock. One employee essentially blew me off, the other walked with me as I showed him badly outdated beer. He was a newly hired worker and seemed genuinely disturbed by the age of some product. He vowed to take it up with store management and agreed it should be removed from shelves. Upon subsequent visits, all of that old stock continued to gather dust, underscoring the mindset of management not giving a rat’s ass. Given these experiences, I decided not to revisit the topic last week as the worker was stripping the shelves with indifference. The whole scene felt like someone cleaning out a house before the occupant dies. The distributor who handles Hofbrau in my area was merely up to its old tricks, I suspect. Last April, I saw Delicator appear on the shelves at a few different retailers, all with a BB date of May IIRC. Right before this Christmas, I saw cases of Delicator hit the floor of two different TW locations— with that same BB date of May. I suppose the TW stores could have kept those cases hanging around their stockroom, but this looked to be a display set up by the distro at each store with other holiday/winter beers. Fortunately, the Oktoberfest HB shows up fresh each season, but that’s a massive drop at liquor stores and grocers all over town. It’s the lesser demand HB beers, like the Maibock and Delicator, that seem to be caught up in some black hole.
I never knew why some beer sellers use a letter at the beginning of their production date instead of the usual month/day/year with numbers.
