Chris_H_2 wrote:washing machine wrote:Are the craft beer communities on your local Facebook and .orgs as pedantic and fussy as the ones in my neck of the woods?
A local brewery that consistently makes some of the best IPA in Texas recently had a printer issue with their bottling line and about half a batch of beer didn't get the bottling dates printed on it. I certainly understand the need for dates, but the outcry about this issue was ten club level bitching. I honestly feel like these beer nerds would prefer the brewery not even stock the undated beer on grocery store shelves.
Without sounding too much like a snob, I can tell you that I wouldn't even consider buying an IPA without knowing the bottling date. I've been burned too many times with crappy old beers. The time lapse really does change the taste with most of these IPA's. Consider Zombie Dust out of 3 Floyds. If you do a taste test between a fresh one and even a 2-month-old one, the flavor profile changes a ton.
There's a store near me that that still has 2015 Founders Harvest Ale, a dry hopped beer that is intended to be drank fresh. They're still asking $18 for it. It's got to taste like vinegar now.
I can get behind a lot of this while still having a bone to pick with beer nerds.
Personally, I'd expect a store to discount or fire sale glaringly out of date IPAs, but other than that it's simply a matter of "buyer beware." At an old place I managed, we had a batch of some barrel aged MOA IPA that just didn't sell. I opened one with our staff and we all decided that the beer was still interesting. The bottle conditioning added some cool stuff from the barrel over time, but the New Zealand hops completely fell off. We sold it for less than half the price and people knew what they were getting.
Now that being said, I wouldn't feel bad selling a 2 month old Zombie Dust or Pliny for full price at my bar on the super rare instance where a beer like that didn't move in time. Yeah, the hop characteristic slowly declines, but after two months, the hops in those beers are by no means "bad." It's just business.
I guess my contention isn't so much with beer drinkers knowing and caring about these things, but rather with beer drinkers who go out of their way to bitch about retailers and bars who are just trying to move product. The folks I'm referring to literally would rather see a brewery or store not stock fresh beer that was accidentally not dated instead of seeing it on display.