What is the new "FRESH"?

they are volatile. maybe the next step in brewing is to brew with this degeneration in mind so the beer hits the consumer generally at its peak? or is freshest ALWAYS best? i have a hard time believing that. dunno just brainstorming here. at first i thought stone fresh by was kinda silly but i suppose it does address the problem and ensure the consumer is aware that they are drinking the beer as the brewer intended.

 

The flip side of this approach, however, is that getting to try a beer you've been dying to try when it's past its prime kind of ruins the experience (or at least significantly alters it). Then again, if it's gone to crap, it's easier to convince yourself it wasn't that great a beer anyhow -- which makes never trying it again easier to deal with.

 

SN also believes Torpedo holds up for 150 days and the Harvest Beers for 100.

From SierraNevadaBill in another thread:
"Now, on to the argument of what is fresh. We consider the bulk of our beer to be "fresh" for about 150 days--if, and only if, stored under proper conditions (cool, dry, out of UV light etc.) Our Harvest beers (no Hem, So Hem, Estate, single hopped etc) we want to see pulled after 100 days. Bigfoot, Narwhal and the Ovila series are "fresh" for 365 days or longer.
These are not simply arbitrary dates, our sensory and quality teams evaluate various packagings of beer and in blind triangle testing found that beers past these dates have a "notable difference from the initial packaged product."

 

The critical aspect is "cool" storage. In a reply to me Bill stated something like 40-something degrees. When I buy beer at my local beer store (retail beer distributor) the beer is sitting on the floor at room temperature. So, that beer will have a best buy timeframe much less than 150 days.

Cheers!