a store owners interesting thoughts about ipas

And then there are those bottleshops that have that long shelf of import beers they keep in the front of the store. In the window. Facing the blazing sun.

 

You're wrong.

 

My perspective:

I drink my staple IPAs a month or two or even three months beyond their bottling dates with no problems whatsoever. However, when I have to trade, I try to send the freshest I can find.

So yeah, a 2 month old Furious wouldn't ruin my day. But I'd be bummed if I got PtE at 2 months.

 

Absolute pure poppycock...

Today (3/23) we are delivering to retail Bud Light 30 packs that were packaged on Wednesday (3/21) and Bootlegger's Pale Ale 1/6 barrels which were kegged last Friday. The accuracy of distributors forecasting systems generally borders on nothing short of amazing and is used by the brewers as a tool which assists them in adjusting their brewing schedules.

Please stop blaming a system which you may or may not understand.

 

Agreed. A few times I have had a 6 day old keg of Finest Kind on tap at home. 6 days old. Pretty amazing.

 

Oh yeah!? Well, your face is wrong.

...and I'm having an IPA tonight and I'm NOT sharing it with you.

 

almost exclusively drink ipa on tap. problem is my getting out & about is dwindling, so i ipas are a rarer & rarer specimen. luckily i'm not a hop-head suffering some sort of withdrawals. i can't say that the store owner is *wrong* or short sighted. that doesn't mean i'm saying he's right, just that he has a point & opinion worth respecting.

also not taking the owner's side, & i realize my market may not represent others/all markets, but some things i've observed personally i don't think are taken into account here.

take for example, the owner has been around a long time (often that doesn't happen if you don't know a little something). the owner feels a certain way yet i'm sure he still stocks plenty of ipas because they're popular. because they are popular, breweries brew lots of them/it. since a lot is made, a lot needs to be distributed. just as the owner is concerned about the rapid expiration, it only makes sense that a good distributor would be worried about the same & be pushing it out of their hands & watch.

accepting that much as somewhat accurate, you can best believe savvier distributors are capable of making owners like the one above take more quantity/variety than he may want/ feels comfortable with. i could go more directly into how i see it done... but the point i'm trying to make is it can be a bit naive & oversimplified to dismiss the whole thing as the guy orders too much ipas / doesn't know how to manage/calculate proper consumption.

 

So true. Like demands in trades for Pliney less then a week old. Which for me in Socal, is pretty hard to pull off. Maybe if you get it @ RR the day it's stamped, ship that day, it will make it into someones hands before it's a 7 days old, but suchs requests to me are a bit extreme imho. Do IPA's change from days, weeks, and months, yes, but a great IPA doesn't moprh from a great IPA to a Corona just because it's 4-6 weeks old.

However, with all that said, the store owner does have a point with some merit, and I'm gulity of this myself, as the vast majority of my fridge is not IPA's, but bottles that last, barley wines, RIS, strong ales, etc. I tend to drink IPA's when seasonals are tapped at the local bar mostly.

 

I just read in another thread something like "after a month American IPAs turn into drain pours". I mean has anyone done an honest blind taste test of 1 week, 1 month and 2 month etc old IPA and been able to pick out which is which?

 

I'd hope the the brewers setting "best by" dates have...though I doubt it.

 

I have actually done this with 2 and 6 week old Pliny and several other top rated IPA's. The weird thing is that Pliny was noticed as tasting different by 3 out of 4 people (the fourth said it tased the same). All 3 of the people were correct in guessing which was the older IPA. On the other beers we tested nobody noticed a difference at all or the group was wrong about which was the freshest.

 

I call it the IPA bubble. Its gonna burst and a few average/overprices IPAs will slowley fade from existance. Because from my point of view it is impossible for a store owner to have a steady supply of fresh IPAs. For example I walk into a distro and buy a case of good fresh Ipa, the owner will likely go out and buy two more cases of the same beer, the said 2 cases may get bought but most likely won't. I'll come back in a week later and get another "fresher" or different IPA unless the first case I had was inexpensive and uber good. Its a viscious cycle, that imo leads to more bad beer(out of date IPAs) than good beer(fresh IPAs) in stock.

 

I'd like to see this done a few times. I'd be willing to bet there is more difference in batch variation than there is in that small difference in age.

To the OP: These beers also tend to be the money makers for breweries. Demand is high and they are relatively easy to brew.

 

I agree 100 percent, but thought it was weird we noticed it in PtE which is always mentioned in these debates.

 

what were the other ipas?

 

Heady Topper, Gandhi Bot, and Lawson's DS. We've also done it with Hopslam and Nugget Nectar all on seperate ocassions.

 

I don't understand those that won't drink an IPA past one month, like all of the sudden something magical happens in the can/bottle at one month... I can see 3 or 4 months.

 

My understanding is that there a quite a bit of bottle variation in Pliny. Perhaps coincidentally the newer one was a bit of a hoppier batch to begin with. Not saying that there is no difference, or even that 4 weeks would not change the beer, just offering another possible explanation for what you experienced besides age.