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Comment by pfranz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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? ;)

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