There are many great debates going on among beer nerds. I find most of these debates interesting but don't consider myself a beer nerd. Let's just say that I'm enthusiastic about beer. So, what are these great debates that I find so interesting? Bottles or cans? "Extreme" beers or "session" beers? Packaged on date or no packaged on date? Personally, I think cans are great, extreme beer has a place in brewing and consumers have a right to more information when spending $15 on a 750 ml. bottle of craft beer. Tonight, the local beer store called my name where I studied aisles of beer trying to determine which breweries will take ownership of my Obama tax break money. I laid my eyes on several selections from Great Divide Brewing Company and thought back to the "Three Threads" question in Beer Advocate Magazine this month about a national "packaged on" date standard. Here is what Brian Dunn, founder of Great Divide Brewing Company said:
"...Ever since we opened in 1994, we've used some sort of dating on our labels. Our current method is to clearly print the bottling date on each label with a high-speed ink jet printer. We spent quite a bit of money on that printer because I think that beer drinkers need to know when the beer was bottled..."
I am not here to pick on Great Divide. I like their beer and they even got some of my money tonight. With that being said, I have a few issues to get off my chest.
As Brian pointed out, bottled on dates are important. Great Divide's bottles had two methods of notification, label hash marks and computer generated font. The bottle with the "hash" method was bottled in 2007 and the computer printed bottle was hardly legible. It was either bottled in 2005 or 2008. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don't want to spend my money on "bad" beer and more importantly, I don't want to judge a brewery on a beer that has been sitting on the shelf for too long. So, I ask you, beer people, is this bottled on date debate just a big marketing tool? Are we really getting fresh beer or are we being fooled? How do we know which Great Divide beers are made to store and which beers are made with a shelf life of 3 months?
2 comments:
Like a beer enthusiast that we are of course we wanted our beers to be as freshly bottle as it can. Only problem with some of these company's is that they are finding ways to make to money from their lost and serve again all those stale tasting beers for our benefit.
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Thanks for the comment, Rafael, although I'm not sure that I'm following. Can you elaborate? Are you saying they are taking back old beer, reconditioning it and selling it again as fresh beer?
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