Go ahead and read that headline again. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. As someone who buys a LOT of hoppy beer, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but it’s getting really hard to buy hop-forward beer.
With GABF 2019 results in the books, you can’t help but notice that once again the Juicy Or Hazy IPA category had the most entries with 348, followed closely by the American IPA category with 342. Hop-forward beers continue to grow in popularity as well as production. I also monitor hundreds (no exaggeration) of label approvals a day, and I can tell you that there are a lot of new hoppy beers hitting our beer shelves (more than half of the labels I view are hop-forward).
With all of that in mind, you have to be asking yourself why it’s getting harder to buy hop-forward beers. If I add in a qualifier, then the reason it’s getting harder may be a bit more obvious. How about “fresh hop-forward beers?” Are you getting the picture now?
At least once a week I wander the beer aisles in our local bottle shops, and while some businesses do better than others, I’m still struggling to buy fresh hop-forward beers. Even with the mybeerbuzz-advantage I have of knowing when most beers are coming to market, it’s still hard to find these beers AND it’s still hard to be sure you’re getting the current year’s batch.
As an example, just last month I was chasing a case of Founders Mosaic Promise for the beach. My own mybeerbuzz.com news feed tells me that Mosaic Promise 2019 was just released for summer in July. Off I go to the bottle shop to buy the 15-pack. Thankfully Founders is actually printing freshness dates on the box, because right at the front of the 15-pack section, are two boxes with 2017 dates….and I’m betting someone bought that 2-year-old Mosaic Promise.
A better example is one of my go-to hoppy beers: Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. They have recently added dates, but prior to that just try find a date on any of the Two Hearted packaging beyond the can itself. With no cut-out in the packaging to see the bottom of the can, there was no way to tell fresh Two Hearted from year-old+ Two Hearted. In the last 14-months alone, I’ve returned two 12-packs of Two Hearted with dates over a year old only on the can bottoms. I am happy to see that Oberon Ale now seems to have printed dates on the exterior packaging….and that Two Hearted exterior packaging now uses dates as well.
I have made the argument for better and more standardized date coding for craft and independent brewers. It just seems like such an obvious way to not only differentiate small independent fresh beer from the big beer. It also seems like something that “craft” brewers, distributors and resellers would be absolutely on-board with. Don’t our breweries want people to drink the beer and have it taste the way they intend it to taste? Does anyone in the supply chain think it’s more important to sell old beer rather than growing their customer base?
Picture me as a first-time buyer who’s curious about craft beer. I read on-line that Bell’s Two Hearted Ale was ranked as the best beer in the U.S. and I go out and buy a 12-pack. Unbeknownst to me, that 12-pack has been sitting on the shelf for over a year. Of course it tastes awful and of course it tastes no where near what the Bell’s brewing team had in mind. Instead of me finding my soulmate hoppy beer in Two Hearted, I’m telling all my friends how bad it is and I’m never buying Two Hearted Ale or likely any other Bell’s beer again. Is this the relationship small an independent breweries want with their new or returning customers?
An even better example is another go-to hoppy beer that I drink…Lagunitas IPA. This is a year-round beer, so right off the bat, there’s no way to easily know if it’s fresh like many of the seasonal beers we see. To make that even more frustrating, Lagunitas prints a really cryptic date code on the case box and another nearly invisible code on the neck of the bottle itself. As you can see, the case printed date is cryptic AND not consistent among their beers (compare IPA to Born Yesterday). So let’s say you can actually even get to the bottles themselves at the store. Now pull out your flashlight and magnifying glass at the beer store, and start doing the math. If you’re lucky and you know the trick, you can discern the YEAR it was packaged and the number of days into the year it was packaged. Yes it may be easy to know 19031 is 2019 and Jan 31st (Julian dates), but go ahead and decipher 19172 even if you can find it.
Lagunitas is not alone in this black-ink-on-brown-bottle invisible ink, but I’m left thinking only one thing.
Lagunitas doesn’t want the consumer to be able to tell when their beer was packaged. And the corollary to that is Lagunitas doesn’t care if the consumer is buying and drinking old beer.
Again, I know Lagunitas isn’t the only brewery doing this, but the bigger question is why is a brewery the size of Lagunitas or any brewery for that matter, making it difficult to find this simple date information? We are closing in on the year 2020. I find it hard to believe that even the small breweries without the financial resources to buy the printing infrastructure, cannot find a way to let the consumer know how fresh the beer is. Why can’t all breweries print a packaging date on the multi-packs and cases or better yet, why can’t these breweries have a cut-out in the cardboard that allows you to see the packaging date printed on the bottom of the cans if they can’t print it on the cases packaging?
Why can’t we find a way to print a simple, un-coded, visible packaging date on the bottle or can as well as the 12-pack, 15-pack or cases?
Maybe I’m being naïve? Has small independent craft beer become such a “business” that it is more concerned with not losing profit than ensuring it’s buyers are drinking a beer the way the brewers intended for it to taste? Are they no longer concerned with growing a customer base and drinkers buying their beer over and over again? Have we really lost that concern or is it further down the supply chain?
I’ve heard different answers from different people in the supply chain that I’ve asked; so I’m hoping my readers involved in the biz will chime in and comment. Let’s say my brewery brews a fresh batch of IPA cans and out it goes to my distributor. From there it ends up in super markets, bottle shops and bars. A year later, cans of that beer are still hanging around at these locations. My first question is, who is responsible for that beer? Should the consumer be educated enough to point it out to the retailer? Should the super markets, bars and bottle shops be identifying out-of-date beer? Should the distributor be seeking these beers out? Should the brewery somehow be on the lookout for these beers? My next question is, in any of the above scenarios, what SHOULD happen next?
This is the critical juncture and critical question in my book. Out-of-date beer is found by either the consumer, the bar, the bottle shop, the grocery store, the salesperson from the distributor or the brewery itself. Now what happens?
I think we should all agree that it’s bad for long-term business to have people drinking out-of-date beer…so what happens next? We either ignore it and let the beer be sold as-is to unsuspecting consumers, OR we find a way to make it right. Of course “making it right” means dumping or recycling that beer, but who takes the financial hit? Does the brewery buy it back and find a creative way to recycle at least the packaging if not the beer? Does the distributor take the hit and write it off as the cost of doing business? Does the bottle shop stay ahead of the game and try to discount the beer before it goes bad? Or do we all continue to ignore it and pretend it’s not happening?
I have no scientific or quantitative measurements to back this up, but my personal experience is that none of the above are happening. It’s my experience that the consumers are the ones taking the hit and buying out-of-date beer and the breweries are not doing their best to create packaging that allows the consumer to easily identify out-of-date beer
I can tell you I’ve personally witnessed three cases of 2018 Sierra Nevada Celebration “Fresh Hop Ale” being sold in Oct 2019 in one of our local bottle shops. I know how a 12-month old Celebration tastes and I’m sure it’s not how the brewing team at Sierra Nevada wants their beer represented. So what SHOULD happen?
I’m not proposing any answer beyond simple change. Why can’t we find a way to print simple, readable and visible packaged-on dates on all packaging (cans, bottles, cases, 15-packs, 4-packs, 12packs…)? Why can’t the breweries work with distributors who can then work with retailers to help identify and pull out-of-date beer (or sell it before it goes bad)? Why can’t we all work to educate everyone in the supply chain from brewery to consumers to begin to find a way to make something new happen with old beer.
Why do I see something like Stone Enjoy By 07.04.19 with packaging that is screaming “out-of-date”, still sitting on the shelves in October?
In the end either we are all OK with consumers buying out-of-date beer and not enjoying it, or we’re all willing to take a financial hit to help ensure the long-term survival of a fresh beer market.
This is a problem we can’t ignore and a problem that needs creative solutions, but damn if the beer industry isn’t full of people who have consistently demonstrated creativity. Perhaps it’s time that the Brewers Association join the fight and start to work out date coding standards and standards for removing out-of-date beer.
Before you ask, yes, I realize that this issue does not apply to every beer. I’m perfectly happy to drink a high-AbV year-old Bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout…but keep in mind even those beers don’t last forever sitting in a sunny window at the bottle shop and without a mechanism to deal with this issue, we’re putting much more than the hop-forward beer category at risk.
You may also be asking what YOU should do if you love hoppy beers like I do. My solution is to really pay attention to recent releases and local breweries. I love the fact that breweries like Tröegs have definitive marketing that makes it easy to know that a new beer is hitting shelves or a returning seasonal hoppy beer is being released. I also try to shop super-local and buy cans fresh from my local breweries like Breaker Brewing that I know are fresh. Also, buying Crowler and Growler fills of hoppy beers can hedge against freshness issues, as most kegs aren’t in the supply chain as long and are better suited toward maintaining at least marginally better freshness over the life of the beer.
With non-seasonal beers and beers that are released year-round in the same or similar packaging, I’m currently buying smaller packs. Instead of 12-packs with no packaged-on dates, I’m buying six-packs where I can see date on the bottom of the cans. In the end, I almost never buy cases any more and I’m sad to report that because of the inconvenience of having to buy beers in smaller quantities, I actually buy LESS beer overall.
I try to always pay attention to my own website and only buy hoppy beers that I know were just released. I’m also sad to report that unless the date codes are prominent and readable, I have almost completely stopped buying year-round hop-forward beers. When I recently pulled three 12-packs of my favorite hoppy beach-beer off the stack only to find one packaged on 7/30/2019, one packaged on 03/22/2019 and one packaged on 09/12/2018, I decided to buy something else.
I’ve preached this statement for years on our radio show and it’s disappointing that I have to continue to say, “No Date, No Buy.” With that in mind, I’ve stopped buying all Lagunitas beers beyond Born Yesterday, and until they work out a reasonable date coding arrangement, I won’t be buying anything hop-forward from them. Finally, without date coding, I simply don’t buy any hop-forward beer….No Date Bo Buy.
I love hop-forward beers and they are by far the most prolific style in all of my local bottle shops. With that in mind it’s even more frustrating to have to say that it’s getting harder and harder to buy hop-forward beers. For now, MY solution is to no longer buy any beer that I either can’t easily identify a packaged date or that packaged date is more than 3-months old. Unfortunately this has eliminated many of my go-to beers, but it is my opinion that unless we speak with our money, no one will listen.
There is a solution to this issue and if the hop-forward category continues to grow at the pace it is currently growing, we will be forced to either find a solution, or watch the proliferation of out-of-date malt-bombs reduce the growth of hop-forward beers. It is my hope that as a community that includes consumers, brewers, distributors, resellers and the Brewers Association; we can come up with a solution that allows hop-forward beers to thrive and out-of-date beers to get pulled. Stay tuned and let’s continue the conversation…
Finally someone is exposing the industry's dirty little secret! Fresh product is a 3 headed monster. The problem starts with some brewers not labeling or cryptically labeling their production dates.(Or shipping aged product just to sell it! Horrible!) Next the wholesalers just don't monitor freshness the way they used to monitor freshness. They are too busy selling in new breweries and new brands. Wholesalers are no longer brand builders and shepherds of their brewery partner's products, they are a glorified delivery service. (Can you say Reyes?) Last but not least the retailers have no skin in the game. They simply don't know or don't care if beer is OOC. (Imagine if they ran their seafood, produce, deli or bakery departments the same way! Wouldn't be in business too long!) Retailers today aren't even savvy enough to monitor shelf turn! everyone is so enamored with new, different and local that they have sacrificed quality and customer satisfaction.
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