Born On dates – buyer beware

Picture the scene. A young, upwardly mobile beer-curious flouncer parades into their local bottle shop in the mood to try something a little different. They quickly kill the sounds of Macklemore leaking into their Beats, and take a wander over to the shelf with imported, fancy-looking bottles of US craft beer. So much choice. After taking a few sneaky Instagrams, they pick up the meanest-sounding beer on which their Jägerbombed eyes alight – Great Divide Hercules Double IPA. By the Son of Zeus! It looks the business. It has a ‘born-on’ date, too – exacting information on when this beer was calved. So, they hand over a fiver, chuck it in the Crumpler, and saunter off, into the dusky evening.

Getting home, they flip the keys noisily into the Coors Light ashtray by the door, tug the Beats down to around the neck, and whistle through to the kitchen. Following a cursory nod to the flatmate – what is that fucking thing he’s making? It smells like composted leather – they reach up for the glass-holding cupboard, stare accusingly at the flatmate when it is revealed to be empty, and run a stolen pub glass under the tap. Five draws-worth of searching later, a bottle opener is procured – craft beer is too good to be heeled open against the counter top, after all – and away we go. Hercules. A twelve-labour hop bomb.

But nothing.

Perplexed, our hero looks again at the bottle. ‘An elixir fit for the Gods’? ‘Huge amounts of piney, floral, citrus’? Eh? No, that’s not it at all. It’s muddily sweet, slick like a smear of thick-cut Seville across a piece of toast. Honeysuckle. Bees would like this – wasps even more so, whining their way into the glass like moths to a porchlight. So why doesn’t it taste ‘hoppy’? Where’s the pine? Hmm. There’s a ‘born-on’ date, though. Like those tubes of squeezy ketchup that tell you, to the second, when it was produced. It says March the 25th 2013. So, ten months ago. Is that it?

I remember the trip I took around the Harviestoun Brewery, back in February 2013 (not long before that particular batch of Hercules rolled off the production line at the Denver brewpub). There, amongst many other things, head brewer Stuart Cail laid into the forced widening of Best Before dates on beer, and raised the suggestion of beer-makers here adopting the US-format:

“Most beer is built to be drunk young. Budweiser’s Born On dates were the best thing they ever did. The rest of the industry missed a trick not getting on the back of that. Instead, we have best before dates for supermarkets. When I started, it was three months – then six, nine, twelve, eighteen – soon they’ll be wanting two year shelf life. You’re talking higher filtration, bigger pasteurisation – you’re buggering the beer, basically.”

I don’t know if any UK breweries actually do use ‘born-on’ dates; let me know in the comments if there are any that do. All UK breweries are bound, by law, to display a Best Before date on a beer if it is less that 10.0%abv (according to this article on BB dates from Dave Bailey). That doesn’t mean they can’t also add a ‘born-on’ date as well, which effectively renders the beer as a vintage, with a quantifiable ‘this beer was made then’ notification. In 2012, back in the States, Stone Brewing Co added a new twist to the date concept, by releasing ‘Enjoy By IPA‘, complete with a twenty-point font ‘use-by’ date on the front, leaving nothing to ambiguity.

In an effort to keep the heavily-hopped beer as zesty and fresh as possible, Stone managed this ‘use-by’ idea by lumping a seven-day distribution collar on the Enjoy By IPA, and then a strict four week shelf-life. This ensured punters in the three markets where the beer arrived had a sudsy scramble to pick some up in time. Once that label-displayed limit was reached, all unsold beer was immediately taken off the shelf, and sent back to the distributors. A gimmick, of course, but like the best ones, rippled through with an interesting experiment.

The problem our Beats-wearing, co-habiting beer fan has though, is that as these heavy-hitting US craft beers are imported, and open a new group of drinkers to the possibilities of beer, some of them are bound to be let down by ‘born-on’ booze. The shipping times from the States, the lag in getting the beer to market here, and the shelving all take a toll. As does, ironically enough, the sheer number of stablemates arriving over here. With ever-increasing numbers of US craft beer on our bottle shelves, some will remain near the back, time inexorably lengthening from their birthday. You can’t drink them all.

Having a ‘born-on’ date pushes the ball into the buyers’ court. It becomes a personal decision, standing there in the shop, calculating the natural degradation of hop oil over time, versus the price of the beer and the likelihood of enjoyment. It turns beer-buying into algebra. And that’s for people that are half-aware of what the passing of the months does to hop-forward beers. For others, those equations won’t even leave the notepad. Beer fans talk about craft beer sales ravaging the likes of Budweiser, but by borrowing Bud’s ‘born-on’ ideal, ‘buyer-beware’ enters the craft lexicon.

In researching this post, I stumbled across this marvellous exchange on Yahoo Answers, sparked by a concerned drinker named Jordan, who asked the question “I’ve just drunk a five year out of date bottled lager, will there be side effects?” . He was reassured that yes, he would actually die; but not from the beer.