Fresh beer?

"Most"? There is no universal or even majority shelf life period. For example, for US breweries, AB uses 110 days and 6 months (depending on beer), MC (and, apparently the Pabst brands they brew) uses 17-26 weeks for domestic beers, BBC, Victory and Sierra Nevada use 5 months/150 days for most of their "standard" line-up, longer for others, etc. Many other craft brewers use 3 or 4 or 6 months, some go even longer.

Many Euro imports go with an even "1 year" but even that varies by beer style and brewer - Heineken and Diageo have a slightly shorter period, SABMiller imports (like Pilsner Urquell) are given 9 months.

 

Much like wine. Beer is, and should remain a living vessel in every regard. How it actually changes as a living vessel and what that actually means for the beer itself is as much ingredient driven; as it is style driven, as it is taste driven. Some beer will not keep past a month. Other beer will only begin to taste good after being kept for 2 to 3 years. There are really only a hand full of styles that truly do benefit from being fanatical about drinking them hours from their packaging.
Is it worth it?
Yes. It. Is.

 

Covered a hundred times here, the good thing is that you only need a couple of fresh hop forward beers and a few months and you can prove it to yourself.

 

Most beer is best consumed fresh and this has been known for quite some time.

Below is an old ad courtesy of @jesskidden.

Cheers!

 

Some reading for the OP.
https://www.brewersassociation.org/attachments/0001/3980/EDP_Quality.pdf

 

Many more examples at https://sites.google.com/site/jesskidden/beer-freshness-and-date-coding

 

Buy fresh-drink immediately-end problem. Repeat often.

 

1947's Wooden Shoe was better.

 

Unless you're drinking your IPA's straight from the bright tanks then you're obviously NOT getting a fresh IPA.

 

I think it's greatly exaggerated.
Older beers will taste different, but I've yet to have a older beer that actually tasted "bad"

 

BBC's Jim Koch's father, Charles Koch, brewed Wooden Shoe ... since he graduated Siebel in '48 and brewed at WS up until it closed in the early 50s, I guess it was his version you didn't like.

 

Regarding your first point - the fixation on beer freshness does indeed have elements of unintentional parody to it.
Regarding your second observation - you must be lucky, because I literally opened up a beer a few minutes ago that tasted "bad" due to its age (I'm not speaking of a drop in hop flavor, but of off flavors taking over). Happens to me too often because sometimes I'm not very strict about what I buy.

 

I never put much stock into this either, but after having less than 2 weeks old Zombie Dust I saw the light.

 

That's totally it. Charles should have paid more attention to his great-grandfather's recipes... then he would have really had something.

 

I've really wondered about this, and my opinion continually changes. John Kimmich from the Alechemist sure seems to be enjoying this near year old Heady Topper?

 

If you dont believe it, go by two of the same IPAs that you enjoy. Drink one now. Drink one in 8 months. Report back. The later will taste dead.

 

Agreed 100%. I know most breweries, large and small, don't exactly have the time and money to adequately age X amount of brews. Then taking into account people who are avid and knowledgeable about cellaring may have a much more empirical opinion than I. But in a perfect world, it would be nice to have every beer released as it was intended to be enjoyed. Cheers!

 

In a perfect World beer would be free.