As you may have noticed, we are no longer notching the side of the labels on our bottled beer to indicate when the beer was packaged. Our new line came with the promise of a real date stamp on every label. Well, that little hot stamp coder is trickier to get set up right than it should be, and it doesn't always hit the same spot on the bottle. Plus, the stamp can be blurred at times. We have been working to dial it in, but the numbers can be hard to read at times. So, we are going to switch to using letters to indicate the month - like "JUN" for June, or "JUL" for July. So as you can see in the photo on the right, this batch of Dos Perros was bottled JUN29.11 or June 29, 2011. With our new bottling line, we're confident that our beer will hold up well for at least three months, possibly longer. But you can always see how fresh the beer is by checking the label, or by checking the top of the case box if we have a case display out. I personally wish all beers were date-coded, so I could judge for myself how fresh it was. Some beers are fine with a little age on them - big, bottled-conditioned Belgian beers for example - while some go downhill quickly - like hoppy IPAs. "Best before" dates are a step in the right direction, but you don't know if the brewer is using a three month window, a six month window, a year...
