Old or expired beer

if you avoid a beer just because it was packaged more than 8 weeks from the date it was brewed on you are doing this whole beer drinking thing wrong

and to the person that "doesnt pay attention to dates" you might want to reconsider that! 8 weeks is pretty off base but you definitely want to enjoy a hop forward beer before it approaches a year of age!

 

Completely agree with this, which always seems like month's beyond drain-pour status for most on here.

I'll even go beyond those a bit if I know the beers have been refrigerated the entire time at the store.

 

Hate to burst everyone's bubble but there is no store that refrigerate their beer 100% of the time and any that says they do are lying plus 99.9% of the beers come from distributors where the beers sit in large warehouses

 

I agree with this very much for DJ. I love that beer, and if it's been kept cold it's still great at 3 months. But just past that it really starts to lose a lot of the up front bright hops, imho.

It really depends on the beer for me. I'm at a point where I'll pretty much never buy a new IPA if it isn't in a cooler, save for maybe something like Enjoy By that I know just got delivered a day ago. If it's really hoppy, and it's not in the fridge, I'm not going to chance it. If it's in the fridge - a month easy, two - three depending.

 

Not always true, but unfortunately that's the case far too often. Stone specifically will not use a distributor that doesn't ship or store cold. Some breweries care, I promise!

 

I had the same experience. My first and only bottle pour...It was worse than a pale ale...

Mark down me for the "Depends" box. Wait, there isn't one...

IPA - less than 3 months
All others - less than 6 months

 

I voted for 6 weeks, because anything more than 5 gives me serious pause and after 6 I almost always avoid it; with that said, I typically try for <4 weeks and longer than that is only when necessary.

 

They come to mind for me - I tried an Enjoy By that was still a week before 4/20 but was on a shelf. It wasn't "bad" but it was not good. A completely different beer with little of the appeal of the ones I'd had multiple times leading up to that. If it's a Stone I/IIPA on the shelf in general I'm pretty much gonna pass.

 

All depends on the beer, right ??

 

it's hard to enjoy a nice IPA when the freshest beer at your store is bottled 3/15 idk how a beer can arrive from a brewery only like 5 hours away (Southern Tier's 2xone) this week in stores and be two months old already.

anyone have a similar problem with their local stores? idk if it's just NJ, but i'm pretty sick of having no chance at a remotely fresh IPA unless I drive an hour each way to the brewery.

I even check the distributors' website, for Grapefruit Sculpin cans today specifically, to see it's being released this week, but it's never anywhere to be found at my stores because they either sell out anything fresh in an hour or just don't get it.

or when it comes in it's already 2-3 months old and not worth purchasing.

/rant

 

I think it all depends on the brewing schedules. Even when I have gone directly to a brewery, some beer was bottled 2-3 weeks prior.

 

I know what you mean. We have it lucky here in FL, the distributor picks stuff up everyday from Cigar City and we get it in stores the next day. But I also see stuff from Oscar Blues and Sierra Nevada a week old in stores. So I think it's up to the distributor and how quickly your store sells through their inventory.

 

$

 

distributors play all sorts of games with who gets what, including fresh and stale beers. I've seen "newly arrived" bottles six months old or longer at some retail spots, yet other places get same beer that same week that is less than 2 weeks old.

 

Saw some interisting Knee Deep stuff on the shelf- bottled in Nov. Very typical unfortunately. Same with Sculpin, old beer, Ca IPAs are a stay away from here except Enjoy Bys.

 

I work for a distributor, and it seems like most of the macro beer we stock arrived within a week of being canned/bottled. Same with local outfits. However, if we have backstock on our shelves from last month, and get a new shipment in, we have to put out the older stuff first so it doesn't set on the shelf and ruin. This goes for big name macro beer all the way down to the brewery that's an hour away. We have cans and bottles from this month setting on the shelf in the warehouse, but we have to get rid of the cans from March before we sell the new ones to the retailers.

 

sounds like distributors operate on a fifo inventory management as opposed to a lifo schedule. i wonder if breweries notice this and send the distributors less of that particular beer if they dont move it.

 

Don't forget that beers may need to be bottle conditioned first before going out to distro.

 

Like others have said, it can be any number of reasons, I personally know of a great beer store that wasn't having any luck selling Firestone-Walker front line beers, so the distributor stopped shipping them the Proprietors Vintage stuff (Parabola, Velvet Merkin, etc.) Eventually the store stopped carrying any F-W. It was only after a higher-up (a guy at A-B) got on the person doing the allocating that the liquor store was able to once again carry the rare bottles without moving pallets of DBA. What started as a business push became personal, and a great brewery lost out on business. Just one example, admittedly anecdotal, but I think it shows there is a definite human factor. Also, the big domestic beer companies running basically all distribution doesn't help us craft beer lovers, either.

 

I agree that this is true in many cases, but I also wonder if possibly some distributors still don't 'get it' for understanding the craft beer scene, possibly because the biggest chunk of their income is from the macros.