Achel Extra bottle dating

I don't have any experience with achel, but a lot of Belgian brews have a bottling date of five years prior to the best by date. I know Rocheffort and St bernardus do this. Again, no experience with Achel but wouldn't be surprised if this is what they did.

 

Upon further research, I haven't been able to find out exactly how achel does it. With that being said, I suggest holding on to it for 50ish years. At that point, no one will care if it's 48 or 53 years old. It will just be awesome regardless that you'd have a beer that old also, let me know how it tastes when you open it, I'm considering picking upmarket few next time I'm out.

 

I have a bottle that has a best by 04/2010, so this would mean a bottled on date of 2005 possibly? But if you do get any feedback I woulad appreciate to hear the feedback.

 

Bottle dating is marked 2 years from bottling. I emailed them once about some old bottles I had that were imported before their contract with Shelton. I opened one bottled in '09 last week that was fantastic. 2-3 years seems to be the sweet spot.

 

I was at the store today and checked a bottle and it looked like it said 2017 for a best by which would leave me to believe it was bottled this year. But bearsonacid heard from the source so I can't really argue against that.

 

That's weird. Maybe they changed or their label machine messed up. I bought my '09 from a freshly arrived case and it was notched at 2011 so there's also that.

Do you remember how many years were printed on the label and what order 2017 fell in?

 

I want to say that it had a date similar to a rochefort or abt 12 dd/mm/yyyy. I should've studied it better as this thread was in mind when I was looking at it. My memory tells me that it was something like 07/06/2017. Next time I'm there I'll double check. Or any of you fellas should take speak next time you're out. I definitely could've misread, so a second opinion would be great.

 

The 8° bottles I had were marked best before 2004 which means they were bottled in 2002. Obviously, it can't be much before that since they didn't start releasing it until 2001, according to Wikipedia.

The whole thing is sort of weird because they had D&V International stickers on them instead of Shelton Bros. I asked about the sticker and they said they've been contracted with Shelton since 2001 and didn't comment any further. They could've been mistaken about that date.

Maybe they've recently started marking their dates out further in-line with other Trappist breweries since I emailed them, which was mid-2010.