Retired beers?

Basically beers are marked as "retired" if they are not going to be produced again. Sometimes one time beers are produced again on a rotational basis (sometimes with more than a year between releases). Beers that are marked as "Limited" are automatically retired after one year.

People provide updates when beers are being brewed again or brought out of retirement.

 

The person who submitted the update said a small batch was made for the anniversary.

 

Because someone reported an update that it was "retired" - off the top of my head, I have no idea who submitted the update but it might have been someone associated with the brewery. We get a lot of updates from brewery that are trying to clean up their pages with what is current.

In the specific examples you gave, Aaron and Ann are marked as availability = "Rotating" which does not auto-retire them after one year (that only occurs for beers marked as availability = "Limited").

 

Maybe it would be better if you explained why it matters to you if a beer that was only brewed once is marked as "retired" before 1 year?

Some beers are year round, they only get retired when the brewery stops making them and someone reports that update.

Some beers are seasonal (Fall, Spring, Summer, Winter), they only get retired when the brewery stops making them and someone reports that update.

Some beers are made on a rotating basis (made more than once but not necessarily as a seasonal - maybe multiple times a year and maybe only some years), they only get retired when the brewery stops making them and someone reports that update.

Some beer are limited/made once, they get retired after one year or when someone reports that update.

 

Not necessarily, when the brewers put out the next beer in a series they often request that the previous one be marked as retired.

Why does it need to stay active if they know they have sold out of it and it was only brewed once???

 

Because it was not reported... The few (volunteer) Site Editors do not go out looking for things to update, we just act upon what is reported to us and try to verify the data before applying it.