Beer code dates explained

Good info to try and make sense of things. Hopefully this will become industry standard soon.

I'm still not a fan of "best before" dates though. One brewery's idea of best before might be 6 months for an IPA, although others might be half of that. I'd rather make my own call if it's best based on a bottling date.

 

I like Deschutes "best after" dates.

 

I am with @bl00 here. Best by dates are non-optimum. Please provide me with a packaged on date using a scheme like January 27, 2017.

Cheers!

 

Looks like BA @papat444 hasn't been around lately and his new website is apparently still on hold, but there is info he collected for US brewers* date coding methods at a temporary site - https://sites.google.com/site/freshbeeronly/u-s-beer-list

* Don't see any links to his "International" breweries list.

 

I can decide the best by date for myself. I'll have an easy to find, easy to read bottled on date, thank you.

 

In the store yesterday I noticed two dates, 19DEC16 and 17APR17,clearly printed on the label of New Belgium's Voodoo Ranger. A call to the brewery confirmed these were the bottled on and best by dates. I told them that was a commendable practice then went back and bought the beer.

 

Weyerbacher has a clear "bottled on" with a clear "best by" right beneath it right up on the neck of the bottle where it's easy to find. Big enough and dark enough print that it's easy to read, too. That's my favorite. The beer nerds know exactly when it's from and regular folk know how long it should still be reasonably tasty.

 

How simple, then you could deceide by style whether you wanted to buy or not. But that's why they sometimes do not, they want you to buy that 8 month old IPA doing so blindly. Simply about money IMO.

 

No bottling/canning date = no purchase with a few exceptions when I know the beer is fresh or a beer that I know will age well.

A best by date is absolutely useless if I don't know how that relates to the bottling/canning date and I'm not going to try and look that up in a store when deciding what I'm going to buy. Many breweries who use a best by date have different criteria for different beers, like Sixpoint who is all over the place.

If a tiny brewery like Aslin can clearly date their cans, then there is no excuse for any brewery not to date their product.

 

Is that a company-wide, international M-C code, or just their US subsidiary's, MillerCoors?

Given the fact that so many people want an actual bottling date instead of, or in addition to, the brewer's recommended pull/best before date, most would not consider the MillerCoors method the "gold standard", especially given this rather vague, non-brand specific aspect of their pull dates:

So, which beers are "typically" given about four months and which six months? The consumer has no idea.

Even worse, they no longer even even state their imported brands shelf-life period (they used to say "9 months" in previous versions of their pdf, which I did not save), just the vague "somewhat longer". Is nine months really just "somewhat" longer than 17 weeks? Most would say it's twice as long.

On top of that, they admit that the longer period is based not just on the beer, but on the extra time required for shipping and distribution.

Nope, not close to "gold" for me...

Seems to me easy enough for brewers who want to list only the Best by/Pull Date to preprint the label such as:
Best Before _________ X months after we bottled this beer.

 

I believe Some German breweries date out 9 months, some 12 months. So do you want 9 month old Pils? Even stored properly I don't want that. Fest beers are canned/ bottled sometimes in April/May, as an example and hits the shelf in Sept. So they sit on a palate on a ship , in a warehouse, wherever , thru the summer heat. No wonder beer ratings can be all over, it's hot in Texas as an example vs say Maine or VT. Total Wine over buys and mistreats some sensitive beers.

 

Bottled on replaced best after dates on The Abyss lineup. Ditto for The Dissident. There was a lot of negative feedback for putting best after dates on their special releases so I reckon Deschutes listened.

 

Every. Time. Same. Indignation.
Yes, you should be able to make your own decision based on style. Nine month old IPAs? Not many drinkers that know the style would opt for that. Six weeks? Well...OK. You could still take a hit on this decision though because you have no idea how the beer has been handled prior to your purchase.

At issue here is what a brewery means when they say "best before". They are not saying that, if you buy the beer before that date, they guarantee that all of the beer's characteristics will still be just as robust as they were the day it was packaged and that you will no doubt like the beer. They are saying "under ideal shipping, storage, and display conditions, this beer meets the quality control standards set by the brewery's lab, and it can continue to be sold as a fair representation of what the brewery intended for this beer to be until the following date". But that won't fit on the label.

 

Of course it will fit on a label, just ask any lawyer. All you need to do is change the label size to fit your disclaimer.

 

We need a standard INTERNATIONAL method of determining freshness. US vs European dating vs Julian vs Dog knows what. Personally, I can figure out a Julian date if I know that the numbers are a Julian date. I can make my own decision about freshness if I know when the brew was brewed or bottled. Let's get some transparent date system that we can all interpret.
I don't care when the brewer says that their beer is "Best by" - I'll either buy it or not based on my appreciation for two year old IPAs or two week old stouts. Just tell me when it was bottled and let me make my own judgement!

 

How is Julian not international? Last time I checked there were 365(.25) days of the year in every country on the planet... someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing the "Chinese Year" or something.

 

I'll insist that a best by date is quite useful because no one is going to know the beer better than the people who are able to provide for themselves by making it. For different kinds of beer, establishing a criteria is a necessity. Because not every style demands you drink it immediately.

btw. I read up on Aslin, and.... They don't distribute, nor have a distribution footprint. And, by the looks of what their websites faqs can muster and the images I could see. They are indeed tiny. But as such, and with whatever good problem that includes not having to count inventory and having to change rules while also curtailing who they distribute to to just who comes in their door on the days they are open. They have complete control over their product. A very good problem to have indeed.

 

But once the beer leaves the brewery's hands (e.g., delivered to a Wholesale Distributor) they no longer have knowledge or control of how the beer is handled and stored.

For example Sierra Nevada provides 'guidance' that there beers are best by 150 days of the packaging date. What is implicit in this duration is that the beer continuously be stored cool/cold. My local retailers are not typically storing their beers cold. What duration should I use instead of the 150 days?

Cheers!

 

Who will be glad to oblige then charge by the word.

What was the driving force for best by dates anyway? To inform the consumer or give the distributor rep a rotation code? It just makes sense a bottled on date is the most practical way of achieving either goal. Knowledgeable consumers will do their own calculation and reps who are in doubt can check the app on their phone.

 

From a different perspective, best by dates are a pain in the ass. We have to use them because we make a 100% RDA of Vitamin C on labels and we know how fast Vit C degrades and that is the end of it. Fortunately the product taste holds up just as long and we can adjust Vit C for safety factors due to distribution. It is a pain when running a lot trace versus a production date code

Put a clear Julian or calendar produced on date. I dont know if beer requires additional code info like tax codes, location, etc. but juice does. We print the best by, production time (shift at a minimum), location code (for us), and whatever tax code is required. So if you swapped in "made on" date for the best by, it would work equally well.

And I dont agree that the brewer knows best partly because the brewer loses control of the product. My oroducts arent supposed to sit in a hundred degree warehouse in Arizona, but they do. The Brewer may suggest best practices, but tell it to the half pallet of SN IPA Hunter sitting on the store floor... And I doubt that the majority of smallish breweries can or do bear the expense of determining product shelf life based on sensory analysis. More likely it is a semi-educated guess based on the style or a "yup still tastes good" informal thing.

 

"yup still tastes good" is the self serving (delusional?) rationale. When I mentioned to a store manager some of their craft beer was past it's best buy date his comment was "oh, we sell a lot of that". Before leaving I took out my pen and made a check mark on the corner of one of the beer cartons. Nine months later (well over a year past it's best buy date) that carton with my check mark was still on the shelf. Yeah, they might sell a lot of beer but not "a lot of that".

 

I took Ozzylizard's post as meant to be: no longer unilaterally, but UNIVERSALLY ..the same.

We all know that isn't going to happen. Some brewers believe TMI might cost them.

I say we all have a one day boycott from buying beer.. every month! HERE HERE??

[don't worry, I took my meds.. I'll be back mentally soon ]

 

Cost per word is irrelevant. If the bottled date is printed, it's up to the consumer to decide the freshness or drinkability.

 

Ozzy my toss off comment was cost per word is only relevant to to those who charge for such things and I've met a few of that breed.

To the larger point, on which I think we both agree, is a clear, legible bottling date is in the consumer's best interest. Within the past year I've seen at least one regional brewer switch from dark ink to white ink on a light colored label for their bottled on date which information can only be discerned by young eyes or a magnifying glass.

 

Going to disagree here.

There is a reason foods and beverages in general, if dated at all, are tyically dated with "best by" dates. This means that customers who care about dates at all are quite accustomed to having "best by" dates on almost any dated food and beverage they purchase. So a brewery oriented to marketing their beer to the general public is quite in line with the expections of the public in having a "best by"dated product.

Similarly the distributor's rep who is presumably responsible for pulling dated beer off the shelves simply wants to know the best by date so that they don't have to use a phone they may not have to know when to pull a product. Such people aren't necessarily knowledgeable about what the particular shelf life difference would be for a particular IPA or any one of the several varieties of stouts with different shelf lives. They just want to keep the shelves stocked. Similarly if the retailer's stock boy is the one responsible for pulling out of date beer from the shelves they are not typically going to be handed a smart phone and given a training course in all the nuances of how to figure a reasonable or an optimum shelf life for the 200-1000 beers being kept in stock.

 

As a point of clarification our local reps do use a phone app to decipher the various dating codes which isn't surprising considering the vague means (Julian date, letters of the alphabet, etc) used by some brewers.

If they made me Beer Emperor tomorrow my first decree would be all beers would clearly display on their label both the bottled on and best by date.

 

Let me expand my previous comment a bit.
The brewery lab doesn't assume that the beer is always going to enjoy the best of shipping, storage and display conditions. To that end, they take fresh beer and they leave it sitting in a very hot room. They move it back and forth from hot to cold. They expose it to light. They jostle the hell out of it. They cuss at it and shake their fists. ASnd they do this with batch after batch of that same beer. Then they look at the quality remaining across the longevity of all of these test batches and they get an average length of time that the beer can continue to be sold as a fair representation of what the brewery intended for this beer to be. Under non-ideal conditions, a brewery (lab) says the beer meets their standards until the best date.

If you find a beer for sale in Iceland that was made in Virginia, chances are they did not test all applicable conditions that could have transpired in it's journey. That same beer for sale in Illinois? You can bet that the brewery (lab) knows better than you how long the beer will hold up to their standards. Not yours, theirs.

 

agreed with you for the most part, but I know a ton of breweries that don't even have a lab. Yeah, the probably still know more than me, but they may not have been as rigorous and taken a more casual approach.

Cheers.

 

@LeRose beat me to it: the majority of craft breweries do not own a lab. I suspect that a large number of them do not have a formal QC program of any kind.

Cheers!

 

Seems simple enough - production date, and let me be the judge whether I want to drink it or not. I'm not gonna argue with a Sierra Nevada or Stone etc. who has put the time and expense into testing (I am presuming, but nationally distributed and recognized brand I assume would not want to play around with taking a SWAG at shelf life as defined by them). I might not completely agree with their assessment, but with distribution how am I going to know the difference? Most likely I will never have a SNPA at the source, so I have to go with what I can taste when I buy the stuff.

But the small guys - I am thinking not so much, and I don't want to get started on observed horrors....

 

I actually don't mind the Julian date code. It can be a bit of a pain to decipher, but I would take Julian over no date whatsoever.

 

Hi all!

Ok, so thinking of Julian date and the letter that requires a month, what the heck do the following mean?

Guinness: L6345GE003
Harp: L6013GF006

I am ignoring the GE/GF on, but if L means November then how do the other numbers work??