Total Wine doesn't get it (yet another freshness rant)

Closest Total Wine to me is about 250 miles away, but there is still plenty of old beer.

This photo was taken a few months ago:



Full shame on this one goes to Hy-Vee.

 

This is the true way for it to be fixed.

I also had a talk with an employee at the top craft beer store in my town. We discussed all of the flood of state and other small breweries of various 4 packs/6packs taking over the store shelves. He said that hardly anyone is buying them...very expensive and very few people know the product at all, so they sit.

He did say they are doing 32 things which I think are both great ideas from a consumer standpoint to get fresher beers:
1) retailer is going to buying less variety and less quantity from these local brewers on beer styles preferred fresh (hoppy stuff)
2) what they do buy, will always be put in single can section, to improve freshness of the singles and also more craft beer people seem more willing to buy 1 can/bottle as a "lets try this one" for
$4 vs. a 4 pack for $15. Faster turnover
3) try to appease the distributors by buying larger quantities of the barleywines/stouts/sours etc "cellar beers". They can stick around for 6/12/24 mo. on the shelves and doesn't hurt much. Could even create a "vintage" section for 12+mo. old BA stouts and such.

 

I've contacted Firestone more than once about old beer and never got a reply back from them, nor did I expect them to reply directly back to me. I simply was just hoping to see the old beer removed from the locations that I reported, and it did get removed.

Over the years I've reported old beer to a couple of other breweries and didn't hear back from them either, nor did I expect to.

 

The "Sell by" or "Use by" dates on those products (which, like all such date coding, is voluntary - save for baby formula) have nothing to do with the length of time it would take for them to spoil to the point of causing illness, though.

I always figured that part of the high retail price of "craft" beer is in the maximum mark-up the wholesaler and retailer tack on because of the likelihood of some beer going stale before it sells. (Which, of course, is SOP for lots of consumer goods).

Well, lots of 13 month old imports sitting on US shelves (a few, like Jever, still "in code") so I suppose FW didn't feel the need to reply - yet?

Hey, I'm not saying FW or any other brewer WILL do something about it - as other note, their emails also went unreplied - only that it should be done along with starting a(nother) thread about it. (Which, to his credit, @tzierser did do.)

At this point, considering the complaints from all over including in the home market of California, you'd think Firestone-Walker would have an easier time of it if they simply had a REPORT YOU FOUND FRESH BEER webpage...

I've had a few experiences with telling brewers and distributors about old beer and finding it gone on my next visit. (I once even joked to a distributor about - finally - seeing a newly arrived beer in the state and finding the "Best by" date only a few weeks away and they actually replaced that one before the beer went out of code).

I also once had an email back 'n' forth with a small out-of-state brewer who used a large AB or MC house about a case of his old beer I bought (it had been stacked UNDER a fresh case my buddy bought at the same time - so check ALL the beers' dates ). Anyway, he wanted the distributor to replace my case and he could not even get the distributor to return his phone calls...

 

Ah, the I saw and then bought old beer and I have no idea who to yell at problem. Truth be told. You have provided three paragraphs of essentially just yelling at a cloud.
Total wine doesn't have much control over what they can do to it other than LiFO. But, they could hire a beer buyer who isn't going to accept a distributors lazy presumption that a pallet dump from a successful brewery from the other side of the country will be good for business when there are a bunch of local and regional ones with an active sales force who can be just slightly more pro-active about knowing what each account has. I will presume here that FW's field sales person, if there actually is one in your area merely got a single ride along to the account and the distributor is the one actively making the decision as to what to actually drop off at it. Hence the two rows of a pallet of year old beer turding it up at your big name packy.
Another truth here is that breweries more often than not have no actual say about what happens to their product once it is out of their hands. They can be grossly offended by it, but they don't have much say about what can happen to it other than to find another distributor who is more proactive about generating actual sales and actual turnover of product for the accounts they handle with breweries such as FW.

 

At the federal level all date coding on, say, milk is voluntary but there are 20-25 states that do have coding standards in place.

Those on milk actually are related to the length of time it would take to spoil in that they are typically set about a a week in advance of when the industry thinks the contents would start to become unsafe.

https://thetakeout.com/how-long-should-you-keep-milk-past-the-cartons-date-1823081376

 

Sorry should be 3 things...not 32...forgot to edit check.

 

But that's not what your link says:

Milk that is no longer "fine" is not necessarily "unsafe".

NJ residents used to come across milk that was packaged for sale both in state and in New York, and the "Sell By" dates for NY and NJ were different . (The joke used to be that at midnight do the dairies pick up the "old" milk in NY and rush it across the Hudson for a couple more days of possible sale.)

I was wondering what the other 29 things were that they were going to do... "Geez, and here I thought I was one of them "freshness freaks"...."

 

True. But milk that is no longer "fine" is not necessarily "safe" either.

The real point is that there is a relationship between those sell by dates and when the milk is likely to spoil. There is no switch to be flipped here but the dates are still set to protect the customer and indirectly to protect the producer from legal action.

 

That’s an American Barleywine now. Stash it for 5-10 more years.

 

That should have been sold out of the Vintage section at a 20% premium.

 

As a wholesaler I often advised accounts to buy conservatively and not with big eyes. Having a good 10 cases move through is way better than having a few cases straggling behind when the consumers move on to the next "jewel". Many times I was glad to be out of stock, knowing full well the fickleness of the beer market.

 

This is partly why I prefer imperial stouts, barleywines, and other strong, non hop focused beers. Freshness isn't a huge concern, in fact I'm pleasantly surprised to find them with a little age on them.

 

Challenge accepted . What do I win?

 

And that's just all the beer on the floor and shelves. I don't know how your TW is setup, but the one I go to has an unbelievable amount of beer stacked all the way up on top of the shelves everywhere, seems like far more than they have actually available below. So you can rest assured that they keep a continuous stock of old beers. They do have a refrigerated room where they keep kegs and a small section of rotating beers, but you always have to diligently find date codes on all beers there, so time-consuming.

 

This is exactly why I go to 1-2 of my local small shops for most of my items. I know the owners, I know what is new, and most of their stock turns over very fast so few items sit for long. Between these local guys and brewery direct old beer is rare. TW serves a function for a lot of folks who want the one stop for all shop but they are never going to be fresh beer sellers, won't happen. You can catch the new drops and get those fresh at TW but you will also see them moved to rear and sitting for year once hype dies.

 

Let me qualify that; the Piedmont Triad area. But that’s s great source for NJ

 

Total Wine would be better off if they purchased about 50% of what they are currently buying (at least the TWs in my area). They just have too much inventory to turnover in a reasonable amount of time.

Another suggestion for TW, get more coolers to keep the beer cold. Seems like 95% of the beer is sitting on warm shelves.