Does anyone know how 8 Wired and Epic do their bottling/freshness dates? I checked some Epic beers and at the base of the bottle they had "3113040 - hh:mm" This looks to me like Julian calendar dating: 2013 (the first "3") on April 23rd (113th day of the year) followed by the bottling line and a 24-hour clock time. Here's the confusing part: I checked some 8 Wired and Tuatara bottles and they all had the same stamping (though different last three digits: e.g. 042) Could these three breweries share a bottling line? They're not especially close to each other. Or is this an exporters' stamp (I'm in Ireland) and nothing to do with bottling? Hoppy NZ beers are among the best in the world when they're fresh, so it's worth all this fuss - at least, to me. Thanks in advance for your help.
For Australia, the last bottle of Hop Zombie that i saw had a Best Before date printed on the neck. I'm not 100% certain, but i think the format was 11 December 2014 for instance. I assumed that it had 12 months on it. It would appear that they do something different for the northern hemisphere.
Also true! A lot of their volume is now produced (by Soren) at Steam in Auckland but they still have a brewer (Jason) in Blenheim brewing 8 Wired at Renaissance and guarding the barrel cellar...
I wish mine were that easy. Anyone else have any explanation for identical "dating" format across 3 different breweries?
The kiwi in me wonders why you would choose to use a different dating format. Do you mean three different breweries, or three different brewers/brewing companies?
Went back to Mane & discovered the $13-$18 a bottle 8 Wired had a best before of May 14. No thanks, I like my hoppy-expensive beers fresh thanks.
If it's operating similar to how it was a few years ago, the production at Steam is in cycles - a batch of beers (10 days worth for instance) is brewed, cellared and then packaged by the same small team (ie all hands on deck), so it's not too hard to believe that all three were bottled on the same day (once they had the bottling line fired up). Do they all have US labels?
