The independent consumer guide to beer product
dating.
Loyal Texans looking for a page that sings glorious praise of their state will be sadly disappointed by this list. Texan beer just doesn't sell very well in Michigan, so I don't have much information about it. Hopefully, now that I'm living in Arizona, I'll have more chances to encounter Texan beer.
If you really want to Support Texas Brewing, try their web page.
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Entry updated 1 January 2001 The last time I saw a bottle of American-brewed Celis (October 1996), they weren't putting dates on their beers, but this might have changed after Miller Brewing bought Celis in April of 2000. Miller closed Celis in December 2000.
The Celis beer sold in Canada was brewed by The Brick Brewing Company, who appear to use Canadian-style bottling dates on their products.
Lone Star beers are now brewed by Pabst, and use Pabst's dating system.
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Entry updated 23 August 1998. This gets ridiculously complicated, so I'll give you the simple version first: For Pabst beers expiring before 1997 and/or expiring after October 1998, the first five digits of the production code are a date in MMDDY format. Pabst beers dated before are past date. Pabst beers dated between those dates are using old versions of Stroh's expiration dates.
The complex version: Beers before March 1997 were actually brewed at Pabst-owned breweries; the native Pabst format is a MMDDY bottling date. After the Pabst plants were shut down by a labor dispute, Pabst contracted Stroh's to brew Pabst beers. In the autumn of 1998, Stroh changed its date format to one that matches Pabst's original date format, except it's an expiration date. (See the Schlitz entry above for details of Stroh's dating codes.) In June 1998, Pabst signed an "exclusive contract" with the Miller Brewing Company, but that shouldn't change the product dates, because Miller's expiration dates also use the same format as Stroh's final system. Go figure.
Pabst brands include (or have included) Big Bear, Colt 45, Falstaff, Lone Star, Old Milwaukee, Old Style, Olympia, Pearl, Ranier, Schaefer, Schiltz, Schmidt's, Special Export, Stroh's, and St. Ides. Pabst's manufacturer number is 22100.
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Entry added 1 January 1999. Speaking of living in Arizona, a Texan friend of an Ohioan friend of mine brought a six pack of Spoetzl Shiner to a New Year's party, so I got to examine the bottles. The codes on this particular six pack (stamped on the bottles, just below the labels) were too smudged for me to read, but the web address on the label led me to Spoetzl's Shiner FAQ, which claims they use a MM/DD/YY expiration date. Spoetzl's manufacturer number is 88573.
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