I just installed a home kegerator and bought my first keg. It is a 1/6 barrel of Sam Adms Boson Lager. I've read multiple articles/forums that indicate SA kegs are unpasteurized. However the freshness date on my keg that I purchased in March was August 202X. The last digit came off when I scaped the label off that was covering it. I assumed it was 2022 since the Total Wine label had a March 9, 2022 received date on it. This seemed to conflict with the common opinion that unpasteurized beer stays fresh for only 6 to 8 weeks. I contacted Sam Adams asking if their keg beer was unpasteurized and they responded "if your freshness date is 6 months after purchse than it is pasteurized". Since their response was based on the freshness date I wrote back and said their response suggested that not all of their keg beers were pasteurized and they responded with "that is correct". Do you guys think that is a honest answer. Could it depend on which brewery it comes from or are they freshness dating their unpasteurized beer out 6 months? It would be nice to know how fast I need to drink my beer.
I'm sure that is a mistake (yours or BBC's) - any freshness date is going to be based on the day the beer was packaged (bottled, canned or racked into kegs) not the date of purchase. How could they know the purchase date? Perhaps the BBC rep was speaking specifically of the keg you bought with that August date. Though not as common in the US as elsewhere in the world, kegged beer can be flash-pasteurized - the ability to FP beer before racking it into a sterile keg was the primary reason the Sankey keg was created. (A former AB employee who once posted here on BA said that ABI in the US was "experimenting" with it.) Never heard of BBC doing it but with their portfolio of seltzers, ciders and other kinds of FMBs, it probably makes sense. IIRC, they were doing some SABL at City-Latrobe, another brewery which probably makes more FMBs than standard beer.
BBC representative just informed me that as of four years ago they started pasteurizing their kegs of Sam Adams therefore it is not unusual for their freshness dates to be 6 months after racking or in that case 5 months after receipt by distributor.
Interesting. Likely focusing on the export market. One reason why their flagship beer no longer gets any love around these parts. Kind of ballsy to market the newly Remastered Sam Adams as "Brighter" and "Easier Drinking" while simultaneously torturing the beer with the pasteurization process. That is definitely one process that the shirts in the marketing department are not promoting. Cheers
Ya think? Seems it'd be easy to flash pasteurized kegs for export but leave the domestic stuff unpasteurized. Maybe it's the domestic market, with less and less Samuel Adams being sold, BBC needed to increase the shelf life of their kegs. Funny, unpasteurized draught beer was the one traditional thing that US macro brewers stuck with while the rest of the world's big brewers elsewhere jumped on it. Thought it was odd when the TTB dropped their definition of "draught/draft" a few years ago, although it would not apply to the beer in question. TTB Bootcamp for Brewers - MAY 2020 The old rule was: That was Peter Wolfe (no longer with ABI, IIRC), who wrote:
All true. The fragmentation of the "draft" beer market is probably forcing more breweries than Boston Beer to pasteurize their keg beers. Wholesalers can store the kegs at warmer temperatures. With many bars featuring 10, 20, or more taps, beers might sit for weeks. Back when AAL draft beers were usually unpasturized (the 70s), I remember thinking that brewers might have formulated specifically for their draft beers to taste like pasturized bottled beers. I remember thinking that Schaefer was exceptional, in that it tasted much better on draft than bottled.
Yeah, I agree. Not sure why - just had a very rich, creaminess to it. (Conversely, I preferred Rheingold, Schaefer's Brooklyn rival, in bottles. Have fond memories of New Bedford-brewed Rheingold in 16 oz. deposit bottles, sold in a plastic bag w/drawstring, kept cold in a nearby stream while building a cabin in Maine one summer.) F. & M. Schaefer had a reputation of having a high ratio of corn adjunct - a mid-70s promo book, All About Schaefer Beer THE STORY OF QUALITY, seems to confirm that. Listing the brand's ingredients, after "1. Water" it said: Brought to mind the comment in the Adjuncts chapter of The Practical Brewer (1977 ed.):
I never tasted Rheingold until it was brewed by Schmidt (Phila.). Schaefer draft wasn't very common in Suffolk county in the late 70s. My specific memory was that I drank Schaefer at the little family bar in Mastic where our family went for spaghetti dinners.
