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Comment by pfranz | Hacker News Reader

Beer is incredibly difficult to keep shelf-stable. International beers, unless very specific efforts are taken, will taste off. I heard a story that Austrian beer enthusiasts just assumed American beers tasted "skunky" because that's how they tasted after importing them. Time, temperature, and light are enemies. Anheuser-Busch has a dozen breweries across the US.

I'm not a fan of hops, but the PNW grows 96% of hops in the US--so it makes sense local breweries up there are known for IPA. Historically, beer styles leaned into local water mineral content; Pilsners from Germany/Czech Republic and Stout/Porter from Britain/Ireland.

Regional wines (local wines shipped widely) make sense and local beers do, too.

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The skunky odor/flavor comes from light exposure to hops and it’s easily prevented with dark bottles or cans. Other herbs work well as preservatives and don’t get skunky at all. Beer can be shelf stable basically indefinitely if well kept, and often ages very well.

I had a few bottles of beer that I was drinking, but after some time even kept in an air conditioned room, they did spoil eventually.

Bottles in general are not as good as cans at keeping beer fresh.

If it's easy to prevent, why is it so much more of a problem than for wine? Budweiser had a “born on date” and later switched it to a "freshest before" date. Other breweries insist on cold shipping--that's quite expensive.

Wines (generally) don't use hops. Hops are such a strange flower (or weed depending on your view of hops) that provide a lot of very complex molecules that break down in interesting ways over time. At their best those molecules are flowery and subtly bitter. At their worst they break down into skunky things, some of which at extreme worsts are poisonous. Grapes have some complex molecules, but not the same sorts of bitter sulfides that hops do.

It’s not really much of a problem. Beers that go skunky are typically sold in green or clear bottles. It really is the exposure of hops to light that causes it (and I have confirmed it with homebrew batches where some bottles skunked up rapidly while others lasted multiple years with no such effects, and even aged quite well).

For beers like Bud that are mostly sold in cans, and/or Bud Light often sold in brown bottles, the date labels are generally a marketing gimmick to distinguish from other brands without getting into these kinds of specifics (they come off beer-nerdy and that’s off putting to a lot of their target market).

Again, so this isn't confusing for anyone, this comment is totally wrong. Beer breweries do this because there's a clear change in flavor for beers left unrefrigerated and/or exposed to light.

Too deep in the chain to reply directly but I opened a 2009 Abyss a few months ago and it was still delicious. The label even tells you to wait about 18 months after bottling before even considering whether to drink it.

Was it skunky? ;)

They do change flavor over time, as do wines. It’s not necessarily a problem. My comment never claimed that there’s no change in flavor, only that flavor worsening and in particular skunkiness is trivially controllable. If you or anyone else disagrees with this, I invite you to try the oldest Deschutes Abyss you can find and describe exactly how it’s worse than the current year, or how you found even a hint of skunk in it.

It is a problem; that's why they put dates on them. You claimed it's for marketing, and it's not. Wine in supposed to be aged, most beers are not (sours and stouts are the exception). It's like eating day old food from a restaurant and pretending that's how the chef intended it to taste.

I've had almost every year of abyss going back to 2011. You picked a beer and a style that is intended to be aged, and the flavor changes over time much like wine. That has nothing to do with Budweiser, IPAs, pilsners, etc that are not supposed to be aged.

That's absolutely not true. IPAs cannot be shelf stable past a few months if unrefrigerated. They start to lose the hoppy aroma and taste and taste more muted. The longer you go the more skunky it tastes.

It is fair that IPA hop aromas do diminish over time, it really depends on the beer how that affects its quality. But if you don’t expose them to light they definitely don’t get skunky, at any temperature over many years.

Which was of course the whole point of India Pale Ales. Chuck a load of hops in the beer, preserve it on a boat ride to India. Probably the hops aroma did diminish, but the beer didn’t go off.

And of course those beers were already way less hoppy. They weren’t for beer snobs, they were for colonizing.

The entire style was an attempt to make beer that would not go bad while on long unrefrigerated journeys to India from England, using extra amounts of the alpha acids in hops as a preservative.

Beer is super easy to make shelf stable. Most of the non craft beer you drink is pasteurized and re-carbonated. Some craft can be bottle conditioned, both I would consider shelf stable.

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