These words right here

Sure, it doesn’t seem like much. It just says where it’s brewed. But that is a bit of a big deal in a time when brewers sometimes want to play sneaky buggers with where the beer is actually made. “Bull terroir” I like to call it – where they imply the beer’s made by themselves in their own brewery when it’s really made in a massive contract brewing facility (nothing wrong with that at all – but fibbing about it gives us the impression you think it is).

But the Yeastie Boys have been putting this information on their label for years. Before provenance became an issue. And has it hurt them at all? Don’t think so

These words right above those other words
 See that? The “see bottle neck” part? They tell you exactly where on the bottle you’ll find the best before info printed. I surely can’t be the only person who has spent time rolling around a bottle in my hands looking for the date imprinted  on the bottle, only to give up. Not in the case of the Yeastie Boys – found it in seconds.

And these four words here

Excuse the blurry image – just pretend you’re a bit tipsy when you look at it. Specifically, look at the “best before” phrase. Yep, rather than just printing “Dec 2015” and being done with it, the Yeastie Boys actually tell you that’s a “best before” date and not a bottling date.

So because of this I knew that, when I opened this bottle of Minnimatta late last month it was going to be horribly out of date (totally my fault. I bought it a while ago and somehow forgot about it until it was too late). If it just had December 2015 I could have easily assumed it was the bottling date and expected the beer to still be perfectly fine.