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Legal & Finance
inventory control and create an accountability tool
for you to use with all of your downstream part-
ners.
Finally, it’s an extra layer of transparency for your
customer, as well as an educational tool, allowing
you to provide them with the best–and freshest–
possible product, and the best possible customer
experience.
How to Code
For better or worse, there is no standard way or
best practice guide to follow for date coding your
beer. From a practical, legal standpoint, as long as
there is a code on your package that is traceable
to a batch at your particular factory and you can
track that batch back to its component ingredients,
you’ve complied with FDA standards. However, eso-
teric or confusing coding can be a problem in the
marketplace and lacks customer transparency.
Many food and beverage manufacturers use a
Julian Code to signify what date an item was man-
ufactured or packaged. Julian Code is a system
designed by the U.S. Military to easily date MREs
and is easy to track and assign with simple pro-
gramming tasks. It uses the last digit of the year
in question followed by the day of the year. (For
example, a product dated with December 15, 2018
the Julian Code would be 8349. December 15 is
the 349th day of the year in non-leap-years.) While dates on all cans, bottles, keg rings and exterior
this provides a standard format that is unique per
day and easily traceable on a package and within a
database, it is not easy for a customer to read and
gain information from. An eager beer drinker look-
ing for a fresh IPA would have no way of knowing
what information was being presented to them and by date–can be difficult, if not impossible, for a
might end up looking elsewhere.
However, a standard date might not be the easy
go-to answer that it seems. A report by the Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Harvard
University’s Food and Law Policy Clinic (The Dating
Game, 2013, NRDC) notes that confusing date label-
ing leads to a tremendous amount of food waste
in the United States as “open dates can come in a
dizzying variety of forms, none of which are strictly
defined or regulated on a federal level” and that
“although most date labels are intended as indi-
cators of freshness and quality, many consumers
mistakenly believe they are indicators of safety.”
Putting information on your package that isn’t well
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thought out may create more harm than good.
Finding the Right Date
Back in 1996, Anheuser-Busch launched a market-
ing campaign in a bid to show that their beer was
the freshest on the market and coined the term,
“Born on date.” It has become a ubiquitous term
in the beer industry, regardless of the fact that
the date was dropped from all Budweiser labeling
in 2015 in favor of a “Freshest before” date. Just
because the biggest brewery in the land does it
hardly makes it an industry standard, however. It’s
not even standard across their entire company.
Megan Lagesse of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s “The
Higher End” craft division notes, “Some of [our]
partners (Goose Island, [and] Wicked Weed) are
doing dual date coding (brewed on and best by)
but everyone isn’t because not all of our produc-
tion equipment has the capability to dual date
code,” she says. “So, we chose best by date cod-
ing [for] broader consistency, because everyone
understands an expiration date but not everyone is
educated enough to know IPAs should be drank as
fresh as possible, but you can age wild beers and
stouts.”
Jeremy Danner, Ambassador Brewer of Kansas
City’s Boulevard Brewing, notes proudly that
Boulevard prints, “both packaged on and best by
boxes. If you’re going to only print one,” he says, “it
should be the packaged-on date, as thoughts vary
when it comes to shelf life.”
That shelf life–the basis of rationale behind a best
small brewery to determine. While larger brewer-
ies have the benefit of tasting panels, labs, and a
vast number of data points, many small breweries
get by with a microscope and a handful of jack-
of-all-trade production team members. In small
breweries, with limited, sometimes unique, pro-
duction batches, shelf life is often the product of
an educated guess, rather than a robust statistically
significant tasting panel. Even pressure from a dis-
tributor can affect what date goes onto a package
and in many cases a brewer will resort to relying
on a packaged-on date and using phrases like, “Do
not age” or “Best when its fresh” in lieu of a best by
date.
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