Too Much Inventory?

The main distributor in my state for Maine Beer Company holds some of the good Maine beers(Lunch, Another One, Mo) for 6-8 weeks in a separate room. If they don't sell these beers to their bar & bottle shop customers, the cases are then offered to smaller distributors. I found this out on Sunday when I asked one of the smaller distributors why he had 3-month old Mo sitting on his shelf.

 

100% agree. If a beer falls off significantly after 4-6 weeks, it should not be mass packaged and distributed by the brewer.

 

In the case of the Dreadnaught, there are several possibilities - it is overpriced compared to other shops, the store ordered too much, it arrived with some age, or it did not move. I find it highly unlikely Three Floyd's and/or the distributor will buy back 6 week old beer. What would you suggest the store do?

The problem with your comparison to bread is that you buy the bread at the bakery. You are not buying your beer at the brewery.

 

There is no general experiment for this true for all hoppy beers. Beers that are hoppy with mostly late addition hops degrade much more quickly than the hoppy beers that are mostly early addition. Aroma goes first, there is a marked difference in under a month in beers that are heavily dry hopped. Hop flavors are next, they degrade less quickly, but in a month they are less strong in beers that are heavily late addition flavor hops. Bitter goes less quickly. So a beer that is mostly aroma and flavor hops in a month or two turns into a bitter beer with much more forward maltiness due to the aroma and flavor hops lessening. A beer that is mostly bitter hops will survive without much change the longest.

 

Fair point - the bakery example is an extreme and simplified one, but if a local grocery store wasn't getting in fresh bread I wouldn't buy the bread their either. My point is simply that I have expectations of freshness for food products in general - it isn't just beer. I might have an unreasonable expectation but I manage that myself - I don't complain or badmouth the store, I just don't buy things I don't think are fresh!

In terms of what I would suggest the store do - If they want to attract and sell to BA types I would suggest they check dates as they receive deliveries and reject any stock that is old for highly perishable IPAs etc..., leverage twitter/facebook/etc... to promote how fresh their stuff is & when they get in really fresh stock, price competitively, and only stock what they can sell in short order - ie learn from how long things sit and adjust their inventory. My local Jewel (grocery chain) started stocking some really nice craft stuff a year or so ago - added in an extra section of beer and really dived in - problem was it just sat and people didn't buy it so they stopped and now only have the basics from Sierra Nevada / Goose Island / Founders etc... They adapted, so I would suggest other stores do the same.

That being said as a consumer, I don't really care what the store chooses to do - if I am the minority and most customers demand choice and massive stocks on hand and they can still sell the old beer eventually, then I am fine with the current - I just check the dates and leave things I think are too old and buy the thing sitting next to it that is fresh! If the store never has anything fresh that I want, I shop elsewhere.

I guess time will tell if this changes - if none of the stores change, then obviously most people don't care and we the minority get to keep checking dates and deal with this ourselves (which I am totally fine with!)

 

Good to know. I had assumed it applied much more to the aroma hops from late additions after the boil. I have observed the bitterness never really tames down until years later in things like Bigfoot which are built to age but also have a lot of bittering hops so this makes sense.

I will say that it interests me the focus on IPAs in the discussion (I am just as guilty too) because I imagine a lot of straight up pale ales and hoppy wheats etc... suffer even more - if the aroma hop profile is subtle the beer surely must be pretty noticeably different after 6 or 8 weeks?

 

Everyone has their own expectations for what a beer ought to taste like. That is why you see this discussed so often with folks chiming in opposite opinions. There are always folks who say that IPAs are fine after 3 months, but we are left not knowing if this person prefers beers of a bitter malty nature, or if this person has a palate totally different from our own.

For all beers the only experiment that has any value is the one you do yourself with specific beers and styles.

 

I see a blind taste test with Sierra Nevada Torpedo in the future for me and my buddies! I imagine something that common won't be hard to find at different ages / storage conditions around Chicago. 1, 2, and 3 month old. Fridge vs room temp storage. Thanks for the idea!

 

Yeah I guess I'll throw my opinion in as well. I tend to think beers that have a "spicier" hop flavour (ex. Hop Devil) tend to age a little better than beers that are all up front citrus aromas like the much-mentioned Zombie Dust. Also I tend to think people way overstate how bad beer becomes when it gets a little old. Sure I taste that the hops are slightly faded, but it is unreasonable to always assume that your beer is going to be less than a month old when you go to buy it. SNPA doesn't turn into a shite beer as soon as the clock strikes a month or so.

Cans have helped immensely IMO towards this. If a beer is kept in a cooler, canned, and under 3 or 4 months I think it keeps an excellent amount of flavour. Although SNPA and Two-Hearted are the only beers where I have been able to test this.

 

Fair point - but I guess to cavedave's point the only true experiment on the above is the same beer in different storage and age scenarios (assuming that a-d is mostly a constant for the same beer in the same market - might be wrong on that). Perhaps I should add a extra bottle of torpedo that sits on the dash of my car for a month and gets the worst of light exposure and heat I can give it.

I suppose the exact same beer could have been left on a hot loading dock in the sun at the store for a day (vs being taken straight into the fridge) - I guess that is where you also need to find those stores that are run by beer geeks who take care of their beer!

 

Agree on the cans completely - also they are lighter (thus cheaper to transport), more easily recycled, and easier to hide in the door of my fridge with the soda so the wife doesn't complain how much beer there is in there - can't even think of a downside!

 

I wish more stores would discount aging beer. Most grocery stores mark down meat, dairy and other products with short shelf lives fairly often. Perhaps it is more complicated with beer but I rarely see it happen.

 

I like this discussion...

I love BA's but let's face facts, the BA's are driving this phenomenon, not the retailer's. How do I know? Because I am a retailer. In my humble opinion BA's, especially the ones with a modicum of knowledge, are harder and more difficult to deal with that wine snobs. You don't know the number of potential customer's who come in and ask some version of the following question......"Do you have Ghandi Bot? No,?! Well call me when you do and maybe then I'll buy some beer here." Never once would that same BA take my advice that, to scratch that itch please just get some Victory Dirt Wolf. At least just to test me out and see if I make good recs., or maybe to get a sense of my style as a retailer. To boot, would that same BA's ever buy my Sea Hag IPA so I can even get on the radar of New England Brewing giving me some Gandhi Bot? Nope? (Oh, so you want only the hardest to come by beer, and would never do anything to help me get that beer from my supplier by buying some of the same breweries lesser priced beers.) It's total douchy beer behavior.

Ergo, I MUST buy the mad quantity / variety of beers to get the beers everyone wants. (My Supplier to me: You want Roadmary's Baby or Sculpin IPA or Founder's Dissenter IPL, well; how my Ol' Facorty Pils, Big Eye and All Day IPA are you going to buy?) and so on.

Totally disagree with Pagriley's point about Stone Enjoy By, and I covers what I believe to b the problem with the IPA Arms Race. Much like Tannin in a wine that needs to time to soften, so does high IBU bitter beer. Stone Enjoy By is a hop punch to the face when young...and I love it. But I have also saved Enjoy By beers until as much as 6 months after the date....and love them even more. Time makes this beer go from great to balanced and god like, when the floral hop hature can co-mingle with Pine and citrus it is truly a grwat beer. As a rule the high IBU beers still need the element of time to become a beer that is in balance. Balance is the KEY! But, like the wine douche who only believes that California Cabernet over $100 is the wine worth talking about...this guy will never know that joy of drinking wines that are in balance. The whole notion that a beer that has been in bomber for 180 days, and is a high IBU and high ABV beer, going off or spoiled is out dated and just plain false. Try it, you never know what can be achieved with time. This goes along with how Brasserie Dupont aged 5 years with just when it starts to get really interesting.

So, for you BA's, ho only hammer their retailers for Pliney, Flower Power, Gandhi Bot and don't age off your high IBU beers to help them find balance, then shame on you. I can guarantee you retailer is cursing your name when you leave his / her store much as he would curse the wine douche who only drinks Lewis, Bryant Family and Screaming Eagle.

My $0.02

 

Also, when you return unused inventory to your vendor since it has gone "off," you DON'T get credit for that stock. They take it and make it so you don't have to throw it away, (There are laws against just putting old beers in the garbage due to bums and underage drinking).

And, don't ever think of dropping the price. Since you'll never be able to raise it. Retailers are painted into a corner on this issue.

 

DelMontiac....you are the worst type of beer buyer. Call me a troll, or whatever. I'll take the hit.

Your avatar says Oklahoma but you're talking about Kansas. So, which state does the store reside? Are you somewhere south of Wichita north of Stillwater? Two states, two different launch dates.

So, Oskar Blues brews up a brews batch of Deviant Dale's and stick's it in their staging warehouse. They launch March 10th in KS, and ship to the distributor, probably a week prior to launch date, the first pallet's of what happens to be in their warehouse - the batch from February. That's is neither the retailer's problem nor is it the distributor's problem. They can only sell what they're given from the supplier. I love that BA's think that every 6 days some new magic batch of beers is ready for shipment all throughout the distribution chain, and if I as a retailer don't have every beer in the store at sub 30 days, then somehow I'm deficient. Did you honestly expect that with a March 10 launch date that the supply chain would be full of beers from March 1st? Shows how little you know about the realities of taking a brewery like Oskar Blue to the next level.

Let me ask, with the Deviant Dales' High ABV, High IBU and chilled, (it probably could have survived through a nuclear winter in such a state), why didn't you try it?

 

Can't lower the price. Your customers run away in droves since they think you're getting "funny" with the pricing. In one transaction you loose all good will built up over time with customers.

 

A new skirmish in the Big Dick battle. Just when I thought the posts on BA were starting to get a little dry, a classic line like this appears.

Thank you!

 

Have you ever heard the term "furniture" used to describe Craft Beer? If not, you might not've worked in the biz in the past ten years or so.

P.S. The very same phenomenon which you describe in your post is happening in the Mini-Apple, with more beer museums now than ever before. Trust me: I am *trying* to keep up, but I am a "Switch-Hitter" (that's a term some of the longtime BA users coined to describe oiks like me what drink both Craft Beer --and-- Macro Swill) and do not drink the way that I used to, even though I still spend the same amount of money on beer that I used to when I was throwin' keggers. Hmmm....