Just picked up a case of “new to the store” Veldensteiner dunkel weiß. Apparently the distributor dropped off 4 cases of different Veldensteiners on Wednesday. The manager didn't know how old they were and we couldn't figure out this date code. I couldn't find it on the website. I know it's not fresh, but I'd like to know how old it is.
You can contact the brewery via a web form here: https://www.kaiser-braeu.de/index.php/kontakt-verwaltung.html
I have the same code in my review notes for their Landbier, and apparently it meant best before 5 May 2018.
I shot an email off to the brewery asking how to decode that. I hope you're not right, but I bought them knowingly and I figure it's worth $25 for 20 .5l bottles. If nothing else I'll have a bunch of cool bottles for the blackberry and peach liqueurs I've been aging all summer.
I myself bought the bottles for bottling homebrew. The Veld' beers weren't bad, but they weren't exactly fresh either. I'll see if I can track down where I got that info. Looking at my reviews of their beers (all from 2018), there's a Julian date and the letter after that apparently denotes the year, but it's not passing the alphabet test. I'm drawing a blank, but I want to say I did dig a bit before figuring it out...
I'm curious who the distributor is that delivered them to the store. When I was on the retail side we got Veldensteiner at a great price, but the best by date was within a few weeks of delivery. Wonder if its aging on the distributor side or overseas.
While it says "Mindestens haltbar bis" (best before) on the label, that is where the German best by date would normally go. The code that is there instead for the export bottles is most likely a julian date denoting a bottled on date, not a best by date, as julian dates are not commonly used for best by dates. Not that it makes that much of a difference anymore with the date being 5/5/2018...
Possible, but I'd seen the very same bottles as early as fall 2017 collecting dust in the store at which I bought them. Fairly certain none of them were moving. I was just there a couple days ago and many of those Veld' beers are still there, as well as a variety of other brands as old as 2013, collecting fuzz. I have, however, noticed at least two date code periods about a year apart for the wave of Veld' bottles that entered the local market. But they'd all be at least a year or more old by now.
I'm pretty sure it's on the distributor side. The May, 2018 date makes sense. This is the only place around that carried Veldensteiner. I bought a couple of pils last (2018) summer and they never restocked after those ran out. The four cases (1 pils, 1 dunkelweiß, 2 landbier) were likely sitting in the warehouse this whole time. The dunkelweißen is still drinkable. It has good carbonation, but tastes weak & thin. It hasn't gone bad, just lost most richness and body. Think of a dunkel version of Bud light.
My SOP is to get a large sauce pot, start filling it with scalding hot tap water while also filling the bottles with the water to weigh them down in the pot. Usually I get the water line above the body labels. Don't take long, but they naturally start to slide off fairly easily. Then I'll flip the bottles upside down in the water to loosen the neck labels. Honestly, the water doesn't have to be hot, but the heat speeds the process. With any glue left on the bottles, I'll take 91% isopropyl and soak a cotton ball or wad of paper towel and muscle off the residue. Most German labels will pop off with this process.
Do the Kaiser Brau / Veldensteiner labels still say they're imported by All Star Imports of Miami? (Circa 2010 rear label below). Their website no longer lists them (or any beers). Often when a brand changes importers or stops exporting to the US, all sorts of nonsense goes on with the left-over stock.
I used the “contact us” form on All Star's page. Twenty days later they responded No further info so I'm not sure if Veldensteiner even has an importer now.
