It is our desire to always support our customers and our brewery partners in the best way possible. As savvy drinkers know, certain beers are meant to age.  High ABV, sours, barrel aged beers, etc, all change with age, developing or losing certain flavor qualities with time.  Bottle conditioning ensures our favorite aged beers are, in fact, still “alive.”

On the flip side of this coin, though, is our tender friend the Hop.  Hop aroma and bitterness both fade with time, and I’m sure everyone has the had the experience of opening a year-old IPA to find it’s resiny hop-ness fallen away, and you’re left with an overly sweet and unbalanced beer.  In a word, stale.  These beers aren’t “bad,” per se, they have just lost that hop quality that really makes them an IPA.

At WhichCraft, it is our goal to only sell beers to customers of the highest quality.  With that in mind, we introduce our Beer Rescue Program.  As you may know, most IPAs include either a “drink by” or “born on” date stamped on the bottle or can.  Some of these dates even use the day of the year calendar, which is definitely confusing, and sort of insane.

All this boils down to the fact that as a consumer, stores have traditionally put the burden on you to keep up with when a beer may or may not be fresh.  WhichCraft wants to do that work for you.  We are now instituting internal systems & processes to keep track of these dates (including the ones using the day of the year calendar!).

So in our weekly email newsletters, we’ll now be including our Beer Rescue Program.  Think of this as our attempt to help rescue these beers and help them get drank before they fall out of date.  Once they do fall out of date, we’ll pull them out of sellable inventory at our own expense.  Don’t worry, we won’t drain pour these beers.  We just won’t sell them to customers.

Basically, as a beer gets within a month of its “best buy” date, we’ll put it on sale.  It’s that simple.  Ask our staff during your next visit how you can rescue a beer.

So that’s it!  Help us rescue these beers from the fate of not finding a home and save a few bucks in the process!  Just another reason to shop at WhichCraft, your favorite bottle shop.

 

Cheers, and here’s to always drinking fresh beer —

Jody

Owner