A Field Guide To Fresh Beer
Friday, Apr 15, 2011 at 10:58 am by Hanna Laney
It can be daunting to enter your favorite liquor store and see a plethora of bottled beer on the shelves, waiting to be gulped down. While many customers choose beer based on recommendation, label art or past tastings, there is one other important way to choose beer—bottling date. Purchasing out-of-date beer is a lose-lose. You get beer that tastes less-than-stellar and the brewery doesn’t get an opportunity to showcase the beer the way it was meant to be enjoyed. Being an educated consumer can help you avoid purchasing and eventually drain-pouring old beer.
Working in customer service for a brewery, I receive many emails regarding off-tasting beer. Often, this is due to the beer being severely out-of-date on the shelf. It helps us immensely to hear about what stores are selling old beer, so that we can handle the matter with our distributors across the country. If someone buys an old Samurai in Virginia, we want to know about it. If someone buys an out-of-date Hibernation at the liquor store down the street from us, we want to know about it. Likely, old beer on the shelf is indicative of a larger conversation that needs to take place between the brewery and the distributor.
Craft breweries may differ in style and technique but they all have something in common; they all want consumers to have the best tasting, freshest iteration of their beers. Unsurprisingly, breweries want you to have the best possible circumstances to like their beer. Many people assume that if a beer is on the shelves, it is fresh. Not so, my friends! Even in a bastion of delicious craft brew like Denver, we can still be the unfortunate purchasers of stale beer, if we’re not careful. This is why many breweries print package dates on their bottles to better help you find fresh beer.
How Fresh Is It?:
While it would be easy if all beers had a consistent shelf-life, freshness is subjective by style. Simply put, the hoppier or lighter the beer, the shorter its shelf-life. Beer with a strong malt backbone tends to last longer or, indeed, taste better with age. Let’s say you buy a Yeti or a Claymore and you want to cellar it for a year. This certainly won’t hurt your beer. Some say they like it better after a little time in the bottle. Should you do the same with a Denver Pale Ale? Definitely not.
Hoppier or lighter beers, including IPAs, pale ales, fruit beers and some lagers often end up stale after about 3-4 months. Hops are one of the most delicate ingredients in beer and they wither dramatically with time. Out-of-date hoppy beers will taste profoundly stale and are certainly not shining examples of how brewers intend for their beer to taste.
Rule of Thumb:
Pale Ales, fruit beers, light lagers and IPAs: 3-4 months after bottling date
Stouts, barleywines and winter beers: 1 year or more from bottling date.
Reading The Label:
Some breweries, like Great Divide, include the bottling date on its bottles. This way, you can easily calculate how many months you are from bottling date to make an educated purchase. On our bottles, you will see the following in the lower right-hand corner of the label: “Bottled on: Month/Day/Year.”
Bells Brewery in Michigan announced recently that it will begin adding packaging dates to its bottles. Theirs will reportedly be a similar style, but will also include the batch number and shelf-life code, which the brewery will use in case of reports of old beer.
Some breweries are more cryptic with their dating, including bottled-on dates but not in a format known to consumers. Some breweries place the bottled-on date on the glass, making it hard to read. However, many breweries have easy-to-read dates featured on their bottles.
Next time you’re in your favorite beer store, take a peek for the packaging date. If you see old beer, don’t buy it and make sure to mention it to the store. Like the famous NYC subway system says, “If you see something, say something.”
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Tags: beer, bottled on date, fresh beer, freshness, great divide
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