Is this a 2010 Old Rasputin?

Just emailed them about this earlier this year.

First number is the year (so 21 or 11 possibly), next 3 are a batch number, last 4 are month and day.

I suppose you could email them the batch number to find out if its 10 years or 3 months old

 

Have there been any changes to the label in between those years? Like deposit amounts, Gov't label requirements, etc, that can be used as clues?

 

Hmm not that I know of. I'm pretty sure california has had their crv thing for longer than that. And good old north coast doesn't even tweak their label graphics so I don't think there's any clues there.

The only thing I would say is that I'd expect a 10 year old bottle to have a little more wear and tear on the label than you'd typically see from a beer off the shelf.

 

Ya, definitely weird to have a date code in this day and age but have it be a super obscure one. I mean, you clearly have a label coder. I'm guessing you could set it to print whatever series of numbers you wanted. Maybe try a simple date in the format that the community you sell beer to uses?

But what do I know, I just drink the stuff

 

Well, unless it had gotten stuck/lost in some weird corner of a distributors warehouse (which, the odds of seem really slim....).

 

So, in production facilities of a certain size, or larger, they use codes to break things down even further. Not just date, but shift, and various points in the shift. In the food plants I've worked in, they want to know where/when in the system quality/mistakes happened. If they can narrow a certain issue down to a certain time frame, they can isolate the recall frames.

Or, whatever.

 

The glass bottle manufacturers typically emboss their own codes around the base of the bottles, which usually includes two digits for the year of manufacturer. On an Owens-Illinois (don't know if NC uses them) bottle, it's after the OI symbol.

OI and other bottle makers also use a tiny stamped code (some in ink, some, like OI looks like a laser?), too, that includes a two digit year.

 

Oh ya, I'm not saying get rid of the batch code. Maybe just run the full date concurrent with the batch code after it. Its just weird to see people printing a difficult jumble when they could obviously make a clearly readable date for customers and include their batch code for their own purposes