Date Codes for Imported (USA) German Beer

I will have to check next time I pick up some Einbecker pils in cans. Cstamp I would suggest emailing both Einbecker and B.United as previous attempts have gotten fairly prompt responses.

 

I have reached out to einbecker and b United the USA importer I’m waiting for there response. The bottling codes are definitely different from the cans I bought.

 

I haven't had an Ayinger beer in some time so when I was in the area of a BevMo I checked a few choices and bottling dates were showing mid 2021 collecting dust on a warm shelf.

It's a tough situation because even the more specialist bottle shops around here have plenty of refrigerated IPAs and the like and if they have some German beers like Ayinger they are relegated to the non-non-refrigerted area of the store.

 

Unless I missed it, I didn’t see any cheat sheet for Bayerisches. I picked up a six pack of Weltenburger Kloster Hell yesterday. I’m assuming (hoping) that they are recently bottled based on the fact that they just stocked it, and it has a 299 on the code. So October 26???
“299M1525”

 

See post #99 that is what weltenburger responded to me with.

 

Thanks. I knew it had to be in here somewhere

 

Yesterday, the beer guy at my local bigger retailer told me he had received Hofbräu Maibock from the distro. Last year's stock. He didn't accept delivery.

I asked him what their response was. "Our bad."

Right.

On the upside, I praised my guy for knowing to look at the code.

 

Yep, that would have gotten past 95% of other retailers. Well done.

 

Going with the previous letter=year theory, the M indicates 2021. I had two bottles of their Hell recently: 299M1538 and 299M1532. My store also had 299M1531 bottles. I wonder if the last four numbers are time of day or something similar, because it appears that my two bottles were bottled on the same day as the @WesMantooth pack. I am sorry to say that both of my bottles tasted noticeably old to me. The 109N1555 Dunkel that I had was in much better shape.

@Jaycase

 

Since all the German beer fans are already in this thread I just seen something that everyone here will enjoy. One of the beertubers I watch posted a video of some beers he’s going to review this month one of them was ayinger maibock in bottles I only have seen this beer on draft. I used the ayinger beer finder and seen it’s all over New York but jt hasn’t made it south yet.

 

Link?

 

No reason? Sure there is, but you wouldn't like their answer

 

The codes are so secretive that people who handle the beer at the retailer would be unable to decode the date line, and have any chance of rotating the stock. Can you imagine how many coding systems there are? Might make you switch to bourbon.

 

Not enough of issue to make me switch to bourbon though.

 

Man, I have NEVER seen an Ayinger Maibock in Georgia. Wow!

 

Here's a link to the product info on Merchant du Vin's (Ayinger Importer) webpage. Looks like it's in 4-packs. Hopefully I can find some.

https://merchantduvin.com/the-beers/maibock/

 

Thanks for the tag. Completely agree with your thoughts here and good to see your 'M' tasting old to you which would likely correspond to 'M' being 2021 rather than 2022, thus kinda/sorta confirming the 'letter>year' code. Well, not good to see you had to drink an old tasting beer certainly but think of your evidence contributing to the greater good of this thread.

I think we can reasonably assume that Weltenburger has a packaging date code of DDDYHHMM.

I had the theorized 'letter>year' code values through 2019 further upthread so added on more recent years below, assuming the same pattern. Here's to folks finding many 'O' characters in their Weltenburger purchases this year. Well, later in the year certainly.

c 2011 e.g., 257C1056
d 2012
e 2013
f 2014
g 2015
h 2016
i 2017
j 2018
k 2019
l 2020
m 2021
n 2022
o 2023

 

Where's original Lowenbrau these days?

 

Man,

Man, do I miss that