I've noticed how some brewers will put a "batch number" on the label. Should I pay attention to this number? I mean, are beers with low batch numbers better than beers that have high high numbers? What is the purpose of this and what does it tell the buy buyer?
Are we talking regular beers here or limited release stuff? I'm guessing that in the trading game, batch 1 / first year of a very limited release probably trades higher than subsequent batches
Some breweries use that rather than bottle dating. Just an indicator of when the brew originated and to identify all the beers from the same batch together... for example if there was a carbonation problem or an infection, they could recall based on the batch.
Some of my local places use batch numbers. Simply put, you can reference the batch number on the bottle by visiting that particular breweries website. While here, you can find the bottling date for your specific batch number. It's a more complex way of determining the bottling date.
Pipeworks does batches like that and posts them on their website with bottling dates: http://pdubs.net/batch/ They are printed on the labels, so my assumption is it is their bottling equipment can't print bottled on dates, and they can't predict the exact bottling date when printing labels in advance, so they go with batches. This sort of makes sense too, as sometimes the batches are bottled slightly out of order - it just depends on what day each beer is ready, and if their equipment can't print dates on the fly, they have to use batches or some other way to identify when they bottled.
