How important are Freshness Dates to you?

At this point I consider indifference towards freshness in beer to be akin to a defensive mechanism.

 

Yes, beer lasts longer if continuously stored cold. Having stated that how do I as a consumer know how long that 4-5 month old beer in the refrigerator was continuously stored cold? I read a post by a BA that works for a beer store where he stated it was his stores 'policy' to place beer that has many months of age on the shelves into their limited refrigerator space to 'trick' the customers into thinking those older beers were always stored cold (and therefore OK to buy).

Cheers!

 

I consider freshness to be important. Even beers that cellar really well. I mean, it's a joy to see a fresh and the same beer cellared that excels in different ways. Replace see with drink.

 

Yeah, isn't more information usually better? Gimme style, ABV and some sort of date. At a minimum.

 

Needless to say but I agree 100% with that verbiage.

If beer consumers believe that beers that are located in refrigerators have been continually stored cold well....

Cheers!

 

They'd all be drinking Coors Banquet.

 

I voted that it depends on the style - but like TongoRad said, |I want that information to be available. Stouts, quads, even dubbels, among others, are fine with time on them.
Certain other styles are OK with several months,
IPAs, especially hazies, I do want as fresh as possible; I typically won't buy more than a month old, unless I know it'll last longer, and some brands do.

 

playing devil's advocate, if you're a regular and have built a good relationship with the beer guy, they're more likely to be telling the truth.
Personally, I also check social media of local places I buy at, they'll often ell you what's just in.

 

Finding a store that stores all hoppy beer cold all the time is way more important to me. Lack of cold storage is the single biggest issue hurting freshness

if a shop has stored it cold for me, I don’t mind picking up 10 or 12 week old Anti Hero cuz I know Rev has really high quality packaging and the beer will hold up if protected. Heck, I’ll buy 5 month Sierra Nevada Pale Ale from my local grocery store cuz they keep all of their SNPA in the cooler and off the floor. But if I’m hunting for hops at a Binnys or whatever, I’m checking dates like a hawk and looking for something under 4 or 5 weeks. Can’t trust stores like Binnys because they’ll have like 3 placements of the same beer so you never know if it’s been stored cold the whole time.

 

My vote was for "depends on the style". I'm a huge NEIPA fan, and freshness is a must, although I never need to check, because the NEIPA's I drink are sold out in 7-10 days anyways.

For WCIPA's, these tend to sit a lot longer in the refrigerated sections, so yeah, I do check dates before purchasing. More then 45 days old is "no sale" for me. Luckily, that is never a problem around these parts, especially Pliny, which is so prevalent, it is always available and fresh. It is my "go to" WCIPA and I love this beer.

Stouts and BA beers, well, lets just say I've learned from experience, the good and the bad, and make my purchases of these styles accordingly .

 

Selected "Depends on the style" "Depends on date" and "Depends on refrigeration."

Ideally, all of my beer would be as fresh as possible. Unfortunately, that's not generally feasible for a whole variety of reasons and shouldn't be expected. Fortunately, the places I buy almost all my beer from don't hold on to beer long so freshness is not generally an issue.

Most of the beer I consume is between less than a week old to just under two months old and I feel that's the optimal range for most beer. I store my beer cold and most of the places I purchase from store the beer I want cold.

I feel strongly that all breweries should include PLAIN (not Julian or obscure codes) packaged-on dates. Best By dates seem to create more problems than they solve in my opinion: they set a hard timeline on the life of that beer, they are sometimes more conservative about packaged shelf life than real world shelf life, they remove agency on the part of the consumer to decide for themselves (whether the consumer is right or whether the producer/distributor/store should have pulled it is another discussion entirely), etc.

My opinion on packaged-on dates is as a consumer and as a beer buyer. However, I also understand that can be expensive to implement for smaller breweries with/without their own canning lines; I generally give those breweries a pass, factoring in recent postings on social media about fresh releases and updates from the stores I frequent about fresh product, and purchase it from a place I trust to carry fresh product.

Highlighting and commenting on some other posts I saw here:

This something I really consider now because certain additions/adjuncts seem to have significant degradation over time, coffee is one of those in my experience.

This has always struck me as an interesting factor in the can date dilemma. The brewery may store pallets of packaged beer warm for a week or two until it's picked up and sent to their distributor, who may also store it warm for a week or two before it's ordered by a store, before it goes to a store who may or may not refrigerate it in a timely manner or at all. Beer has a rough life before it ever makes it into your fridge. The fact that it's as resilient as it is is pretty astonishing.

At the end of it all, this is the biggest takeaway from all this. If the beer is old and it's a store you have a good relationship with that has a beer buyer that cares, let them know about it in a polite way. They may just have missed it. Shit happens.

 

LOL... no, that wasn't me voting that way.
You are right though - it could be new to the store, but having sat in the warehouse for a while first. This isn;t all that common with smaller brewers, though - iwith limited supply, more often the turnaround is pretty quick.
This is why clear package dating is important, and I wish more breweries (and there's fewer and fewer that use weird codes or none at all) would have it clearly printed on the can / bottle as to when it was packaged.

 

Not important

Only time I ever look at a date's is if I'm buying beers for trades