A Victory for Fresh Beer

Here's a start but it may not have all the info you want. But with this to start, Google will help with the rest.

 

Forgot the link

http://www.soundbrew.com/bottling/bottling.html

 

No, it's not just a marketing gimmick. Both Victory and Stoudts in SEPA have the dual pre-evacuation bottling lines.

 

Reminds me of this scene... Cheers!

129 INT -- GUARD DESK/WARDEN'S OUTER OFFICE -- DAY (1955) 129
Dozens of parcel boxes litter the floor. WILEY, the duty guard, picks through them. Hadley enters, trailed by Andy.

ANDY What is all this?

HADLEY You tell me, fuck-stick! They're addressed to you, every damn one!

Wiley thrusts an envelope at Andy. Andy just stares at it.

WILEY Well, take it.

Andy takes the envelope, pulls out a letter, reads:

ANDY Dear Mr. Dufresne. In response to your repeated inquiries, the State Senate has allocated the enclosed funds for your library project... "
(stunned, examines check)
This is two hundred dollars.

Wiley grins. Hadley glares at him. The grin vanishes.

ANDY In addition, the Library District has generously responded with a charitable donation of used books and sundries. We trust this will fill your needs. We now consider the matter closed. Please stop sending us letters.
Yours truly,
the State Comptroller's Office.

Andy gazes around at the boxes. The riches of the world lay at his feet. His eyes mist with emotion at the sight.

HADLEY I want all this cleared out before the warden gets back, I shit you not.

Hadley exits. Andy touches the boxes like a love-struck man touching a beautiful woman. Wiley grins.

WILEY Good for you, Andy.

ANDY Only took six years.
From now on, I send two letters a week instead of one.

 

Below is a well written post by BA erway of La Cumbre Brewing. Reducing oxygen ingress during bottling is addressed along with other topics which affect the shelf life of bottled beer.

“Well... I think Sierra Nevada kinda throws that last statement out the window. What they have done is to simply not make much of any beer that relies on enormous hop aroma and focus intensely on QA/QC ensuring their beer tastes pretty damn close 6 months out to what it tasted like the day it was packaged. And that's a route to go if you have millions to spend on equipment and personnel. I love that when I was in Oxford and was sick of drinking buttery, sulfury cask ale, I could go into a bodega, pick up a 9 month old 24 oz. SNPA that was sitting on a warm shelf, and be pretty damn sure it was gonna be the ticket to a pretty flawless American craft beer. I was right.

And as far as a shelf life here we're not talking 30%. If distributors were told "You have 4 weeks to sell this" they would not pick it up. Simple as that. If you could get them to pick it up, it would not be a 30% markup. Again, look at pricing on Stone's Enjoy By.

Most breweries, including mine, check packaged air levels and/or Dissolved Oxygen levels and make a good educated guess as to how long the beer will stay "shelf stable". Some of us plate the beer to check for bacteria and wild yeast as well, but if this is an issue, brewery in question has a lot bigger issues than shelf stability. The biggest single tool a small brewery has is the palates of the brewers. We torture our beer (hot cold, repeat. Force aging basically) and if we really don't like what were tasting, we will stop selling the beer. That being said, there is NOTHING any brewery can do about the loss of dry-hop aroma other than keeping the beer cold. Once it is out in the market there is little that can be done to ensure this as well.

So as an educated consumer, I would be purchasing my beer from places that I know keep the beer cold. I would be checking for packaged on dates or at the very least, best by dates, and yes, I would be trying to get the freshest beer possible.

That being said, know this, there is no brewery (ok, there's one) that is going to start recalling what it believes to be perfectly good beer after 1 month in the package because it knows that hop aroma has diminished (and if and when they do, they will mark it up to cover such a campaign and they will market the beer as such). We all know hop aroma diminishes. All we can do is encourage everyone to keep it cold, encourage you all to drink it as fresh as possible, and put enough hops into the beer to ensure that it does have a good hop aroma and presence for the entirety of it's brewery determined shelf life.

What I believe breweries need to pay better attention to, is not just how old the beer in the store is, which is certainly important, but how that beer will age over that shelf life. I'll give my neighbors Marble Brewery a lot of credit for this... With pretty rudimentary equipment, shortly after they started packaging, they were doing such a good job that they were getting beers on the shelves that were shelf stable for 4-6 months in industry standard numbers. (again, talking packaged air here) So, they give their IPA a 3 month shelf life. Well I have had that beer when it is 7 months old, and it was a fine beer. Was it fresh? No. Did the hop aroma pop? No. Did it taste bad? Absolutely not. I have had MANY beers from other breweries that did not do nearly as good a job and after 3 weeks in the package, the beer was buttery cardboard. To me, that's the kind of lack of QA/QC that would get a brewery into serious trouble with the intelligentsia, but alas, many of those beers are the one's so sought after on the beer sites.

Now, which would you rather have, a 3 month old IPA that was competently packaged, or a 2 week old IPA that was packaged with so much O2 that most brewery texts would say that it has no shelf life? I know which beer I want to drink. Having packaged on or best by dates is all well and good, but the breweries ability to package their product without ruining it is far more important.”

Cheers!

 

Not a gimmick at all. Their beers do hold up much better than other breweries ales. Sierra Nevada is the only other place that I know is doing this also. It shows because celebration will still taste good in the spring. These kinds of bottling lines can cost more than most small breweries. I'd like to get a list of breweries who implement this system.

 

Very easy to access a Julian date code chart and website that lists the various codes breweries use these days with a smartphone.

I have no problem with Julian dates - those who want to know can, those that don't care can keep on ignoring since it just looks like random #'s that mean nothing to them. Dirty little secret of craft beer is that it needs to sell stale/staling beer - at this point and with current distribution models and retailer ignorance, there is no way to avoid it.

 

I would rather rely on my experience with that product and/or other products from a particular brewery. Giving me a best by date doesn't tell me how old the beer is, only the date in which the brewery has decided is acceptable for them to be sold - and most likely under ideal storage conditions. With the styles I like to buy, there's a pretty big disconnect there. But I'm just too demanding and unrealistic with my expectations is what I've been told.

 

Firestone Walker, too.

 

Nothing wrong with being demanding when it comes to beer freshness and at the end of the day we all have to rely on our own best judgment. My point was simply that both the "best by" and "bottled on" dates are flawed, each in a different way. And the storage conditions count pretty much the same way regardless of the date on the bottle.