Accidental Hedonist

I know to some of you are tired of this bit of information, but it’s important for me to get it right. In response to my recent posts on beer expiration dates, I wasn’t at my best in getting my points across, and several brew masters called me for not being absolutely clear in my points.

However, Ashton Lewis was kind enough to want to provide his take on the whole deal, so I’ve given him the space to put this business to rest once and for all. For the record, Ashton is a Master Brewer for the Springfield Brewing Company as well as a Technical Editor and Columnist for Brew Your Own Magazine. I think his words carry some weight.

Unfortunately, the article in question has a couple errors that distort the whole issue of beer dating into what appears to be some huge conspiracy among brewers intended to mislead the public. The opening sentence of the article is clever and inviting to the reader, but it is also hyperbole. â??A loaf of bread has it. So does a carton of milk. But if you’re looking for the expiration date on a bottle of beer, forget about it — for many brewers, that information is a closely guarded secret.â? There are very few food products available that use the term â??expiration dateâ?. A trip to the local grocery store will confirm this and one will find the words â??sell byâ? and â??best beforeâ? on most perishable food stuffs like loaves of bread and cartons of milk. Either the folks at the WSJ, like many big city dwellers, donâ??t do much grocery shopping and didnâ??t notice this mistake or they simply let the hyperbole slide.

Freshness of food, including beer, is not black and white. It is in a food companyâ??s best interest to assure that the consumer eats or drinks a product that he or she will want to again buy in the future. It doesnâ??t matter whether the product is bread, milk, wine, beer, cheese or a bag of chips. If an individual has a bad food or beverage experience their future buying habits are likely to change.

Most food producers like using â??best beforeâ? and â??sell byâ? dates because they are consumer friendly and relatively easy to control since the food producer has pretty tight control over their product in the market. In fact, the stockers who put food on the shelf, for example bakery goods, snack chips and soda, usually are agents of the food company. These stockers are able to pull out-dated products of the shelf and by doing so ensure that their company is selling products that fit into their standards of freshness.

This is not the case with beer, wine and liquor. Most states still require the use of independent distributors for alcoholic beverages and the producer of the beer, wine or liquor relies on the distributor to care for their products in the market. Some states do permit self-distribution, but beers that are available on either national or regional levels invariably sell some or all of their beer through independent distribution chains. This dates back to Prohibition and was originally intended to prevent huge breweries from dominating the market, but that notion did not exactly work as planned. In any case, it is the distributors job to pull out-dated beer and return it the brewery and some do it better than others.

This is where Mr. Knechtâ??s generalization is ripe for misinterpretation. He states â?? There are now more bottles of beer on the store wall than ever — more than 2,000 domestic brands alone — making it harder for both stores and consumers to steer clear of the stale stuff. Age is critical: Nearly all beer begins to deteriorate before it even leaves the plant, partly due to oxygen in the bottle, and many experts say most brews are well past their prime after six months.â? There is absolutely no argument about oxidation causing staling and this downhill slide usually begins during packaging because this is the first time most beers are exposed to an environment that can lead to oxygen pick-up.

Letâ??s unravel his quote â?¦ most beer consumed in this country is very light lager beer with very little to hide changes in flavor brought by age. So his unnamed expert is correct if he is speaking about beer volume. The quote however, is meant to convey the thought that most of the beer brands on the shelf have the same shelf life. This is not correct and is something you pointed out on your web site. Bigger beers, meaning those with more alcohol, malt flavor and hoppiness, typically age better than lighter beers. The beer consumer needs to remember that beer has been moved around the world for centuries and that bigger beers were historically the one most likely to be exported because they had a better shelf life. Examples include India Pale Ale (originally brewed in England and shipped to India), Russian Imperial Stout, German â??Exportâ? Lagers and strong Belgian Ales. For the most part, flavorful beers last longer than less flavorful beer.

The part of the oxygen pick-up story that was left out was some pretty neat stuff about brewing technology. Advances in bottle filler design has dramatically reduced oxygen pick-up during filling and most beers on the shelf today taste differently from beers a couple of decades ago when oxidation was a very big deal.

The bottom line is that beer freshness is not black and white. Bigger beers last longer on the shelf than the everyday pale, yellow brew. Refrigeration dramatically improves shelf life and many beers of the world taste great after a year of cold storage. Light causes problems for beer and many beers packaged in clear and green bottles smell skunky because ultraviolet light reacts with hop components in beer and the result is skunky beer.

Some beers, for example Miller Genuine Draft and Rolling Rock, use reduced hop products (meaning at the molecular level a double bond has been converted to a single bond by the addition of hydrogen) and are not susceptible to this light-catalyzed reaction. Brown glass filters UV light and thatâ??s why beer is brown bottles is not skunky. Finally, beer with yeast in the bottle is generally ages better than filtered beers.

It looks like your web site is dedicated to the food lover and this debate about beer freshness has a twist of irony that should appeal for the advocate of the under dog. Big breweries specializing in brewing bland beer donâ??t object to your suggestion of settling this by printing a date on the bottle. Anheuser-Buschâ??s very clever and calculated way of doing this was to use a â??born on dateâ? and then tell the consumer how many days beyond packaging is acceptable. This clever bit of gamesmanship gets beer drinkers thinking that all beers have a 120 day shelf life and most beer drinkers never consider that all beers are not the same when it comes to shelf life.

Thereâ??s no conspiracy here. Itâ??s simply a hard thing to clearly define and thatâ??s why many beers donâ??t have best before or packaging dates. I wonder why Mr. Knecht didnâ??t question why wineries avoid such dates.

Technorati Tags: Drink, Beer, Expiration Dates

It’s seems as if there is mucho confusion when it comes beer expiration dates, and this has lead to some debate. Let me clarify some points I made.

Firstly, I stick by the following statement I made in my previous post: a fresher beer doesn’t always mean a better beer. The major breweries have simply convinced us otherwise. All beers are not equal and should not be judged by the practices of macro-breweries.

A beer can be aged in two ways – either prior to bottling or within the bottle itself. If it ages in the bottle, it’s called “bottled conditioned”. Whether the beer is bottled conditioned is determined by the brewery and (to a lesser extent) the type of beer they are producing. Bottle conditioned beer does mature in the bottle and tastes better after it has had time to mature in the bottle. As the alt.beer.faq states ” (bottle conditioned beer) will continue to age in the bottle, and the character of the beer will change over time. For some kinds of beer this is good, for others it means they will spoil after a while.” This was the kind of beer I was refering to in the previous post.

However, most beers are pasteurized. Typically in these cases, the beer is aged prior to pasteurization. Again, the length of time of aging depends upon the brewery and the kind of beer brewed. A pasteurized beer is most likely at it’s peak immediately after bottling and then does start to degrade. Exposure to oxygen is not a good thing for beer, and it’s also unavoidable during the bottling process.

How a beer degrades after it’s peak depends on several other variables. Temperature variations over the life span of an unconsumed bottle, how much light and what kind of light the beer is exposed to (both before bottling and afterward), even the color of the glass that the beer is bottled all affect the taste of the beer. Different brands and different types of beer react differently to them, but it’s generally considered good practice to prevent massive fluctuations of any of these variables.

Getting back to the initial point of the article, putting expiration dates on bottles is a good thing, one in which Mr. Knecht was correct in pointing out. However, without educating the his readers on the hows and whys of brewing, he painted the entire industry under one giant brush, when the reality is that different breweries, different beers, and different brewing techniques require different standards. Comparing a Coors against an Anchor in regard to a beer’s lifespan is akin to comparing a TV dinner against a homemade version of the same meal.

Technorati Tags: Drink, Beer, Expiration Dates

My mind has been going around in circles involving the Beer expiration date story that was published last week. Aside from the arrogance of some of the beer companies in regard to the consumers right to know, I felt as if there was something a bit off in the articles premise.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, some beer companies (not all) print either the expiration date or the creation date on each bottle in such a way that makes it difficult for consumers to read. Oftentimes the dates are encoded in such a way that only those people “in the know” can understand how to decipher the label.

Because of this, I’m deducting popularity points to the various beer companies who partake in this sort of behavior.

But G. Bruce Knecht, the writer of the piece, has a faulty premise in his article, implying that every beer is equal. The clues within his articles arise when he starts talking about the shelf life of each beer. Coors has an expiration date of 112 days, while Anchor Steam (whose president comes off looking badly in the writing) has a shelf life of a year, at least if one is to believe their spokesman in the article.

Why the discrepancy of 253 days between the two beers? Is Anchor trying to pull something over the eyes of the consumer?

The answers to these questions come down to the beers themselves. Consider the following:

Fresh beer doesn’t really taste that good. Much like many fermenting beverages, beers need time to mature. In the cases of lagers, the time frame towards maturation is measured in weeks. For some porters and stouts, the time frame can be measured in months and years. Typically the more complex the beer in regard to its flavors, the more time is needed to mature. Once a beer hits that time, it’s considered its peak time for drinking.

Coors and Budweiser want to highlight how fresh their beer is because it takes their beer a shorter period of time to mature than more complex beers. Anchor, on the hand, doesn’t want you to know the expiration date, because when the expiration date is compared against a Budweiser, consumers now have the mindset that newer equates to better, when that’s not necessarily the case.

Or to put it another way, a fresher beer doesn’t always mean a better beer. The major breweries have simply convinced us otherwise.

Of course all of this could be settled if each brewer would put a “peak consumption date” on the bottle instead of an “expiration” or “bottled on” date. But does anyone ask me my opinion?

Hmmf.

Update: Read this.

Update II: A Brewer responds

Technorati Tags: Drink, Beer, Beer expiration dates

There’s a great article out from the Wall Street Journal entitled The Search For Fresh Beer highlighting the secret codes some brewers use to hide the beers expiration date. The article is fairly straight forward, but I wanted to highlight this bit:

Why make it so complicated? Most brewers don’t really want consumers to know when their beer was made. “We believe in competing on the basis of the taste of our beer, not its age,” says Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco. The Anchor Steam brewer, which uses cryptic three-character codes like “5NV,” says consumers can look for the key on the Web. “We don’t go out of our way to tell everyone how old it is.”

To tell how old Anchor Beer is, note the three character code. Let’s say 5NV.

The first number is the last digit of the year. In our example above, it would mean the beer was made in 2005.

The second character correlates with the month it was created. J = Jan, F = Feb, M = Mar, A = Apr, Y = May, U = Jun L = Jul, G = Aug, S = Sep, O = Oct, N = Nov, D = Dec. In our case, it means November.

The final character is the day of the month. Days 1-26 are coded A-Z while days 27-31 are coded with the last digit of the day. In our example, that would mean the twenty second. Our code 5NV means that the Anchor beer was made on November 22, 2005. If the Code was 6J1, it would mean the beer was made on January 31, 2006.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it Mr. Maytag?

More on beer expiration dates later.

Technorati Tags: Drink, Beer, Anchor Beer, Expiration Dates