Bottle date Adnams southwold bitter

Looks like Julian dating to me

 

Would love to find this out myself. I've never purchased a bottle due to never knowing the freshness date. If that's a Julian date, is it 2012, 2008? Doesn't look like a Julian date to me.

 

Maybe my understanding of Julian is off then. I would read it as the 138th day of 2012, which does seem really old for a Bitter.

Sorry, I should have posted that thought to begin with.

 

It sure looks like Julian dating to me and it wouldn't surprise me if old bottles are on shelves.

 

All my Adnams bottles have a clearly marked date on the shoulder rather than on the label.They use straightforward dates, the one I'm looking at now is stamped 30 Oct 2014.

 

Thanks marquis, I'll look there too in the future.

I like Broadsides but unreadable dates have largely kept me away.

RE Adnams...They've been criticized for failure to have their beers survive the trip to the US, I agree although the 2012 batch of TallyHo is darn good...it's a barlywine.

kp

 

Looking at a bottle of Southwold now, and the date code is 2326 followed by a time stamp. In my understanding of many UK bottled beers they will inscribe a BBE date that is oftentimes a year out from bottling. That would indicate to me that the '6' is the year digit, and Julian dating of 232 would place bottling at 20 August of this year. Which hasn't happened yet. Which makes absolutely no sense so my theory is obviously bunk. However I will say that there is no way that this particular bottle has survived from 2012--it tastes far better than that.

Now looking at a bottle of Tally-Ho 2012 vintage. The stamped code reads 2274 followed by a time stamp. Obviously, this bottle has survived since 2012 so take that for what it is worth.

Perhaps the initial '2' is the bottling line number and the following 3 digits are a simple Julian date, and no indication of year is provided.

Anyone have any further thoughts on this?