Conclusion: How long is canned beer good for? – Canned beer is a great way to enjoy a cold brew, but it’s important to pay attention to how long it will stay fresh. Generally, canned beer can stay fresh in the fridge for up to four months and in the freezer for up to six months.
- It also has an estimated shelf life of two to three months at room temperature, but this will depend on the type of beer and its alcohol content.
- Always make sure to check the label for the expiration date and discard any cans that have an off-taste or smell.
- Lastly, be sure to store cans in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight and other sources of heat to ensure they stay fresh for as long as possible.
More reading:
Does canned beer go bad?
When Does Beer Expire? – At room temperature, beer lasts about 5 to 9 months beyond the expiration date listed on the label. In a refrigerator, beer can last up to an additional two or three years. This applies to bottled beer, cans, growlers, you name it. 
Can you drink 3 year old canned beer?
Does Beer Expire? A question we get often: does beer expire? Short answer, no. Beer isn’t like milk. With age, it doesn’t actually expire or become unsafe to drink. Old beer’s taste, however, will absolutely change. But stored properly, an old beer’s effect on your body won’t be different than a freshly packaged beer.
- How does that work? The wort—or unfermented beer—is basically Pasteurized by the brewing process, effectively killing off any unwanted organisms.
- Once the beer is fully fermented, it creates an environment in which the types of pathogens or bacteria that can cause harm aren’t able to survive.
- This is due to the combination of alcohol, the beer’s low pH, and the antimicrobial activity of hops.
There are quite a few other microbes that can live in these conditions, but they’re not harmful. This means that in a properly brewed and packaged beer, you’ll just find the beer’s ingredients and a teensy bit of air. That tiny amount of air is important.
- There’s no way to package a beer without a miniscule amount of oxygen sticking around.
- At our brewery, we measure this amount in parts per billion.
- With time, that oxygen inside every bottle, can, or keg, changes the beer.
- This is called “oxidation” and is responsible for a range of flavors.
- Some beers will develop a stale, cardboard-like flavor, accompanied by a note of sherry.
More malt-forward beers can develop a sweet, bready, and even toffee-ish flavor. In a beer of ours called —a bourbon barrel-aged Tripel—we’ve noted some of those pleasant toffee and almost caramel-like flavors developing with age. A beer’s “hoppiness” will also dissipate with age.
Hop aromas in particular are notoriously time-sensitive. The bitterness hops impart in the beer will stay in the mouthfeel, but any of those piney, citrusy, or floral hop aromas that characterize a hop-forward beer won’t stick around in an older beer. But what about skunky beer? Light is the culprit there.
Beer ages poorly under any ultraviolet light (thus why a term for properly aging beer is “cellaring” or keeping it in a dark place). Brown bottles and aluminum cans are both effective at blocking out light. But beer in a clear or lighter-colored bottle will develop that signature “skunk-like” flavor if left out.
Another, different staling agent is heat. The higher the heat, the faster the staling. Heat doesn’t create a specific off flavor itself (unlike light). Instead, it acts to speed up the process of oxidation. Our lab actually uses a warm fridge to simulate age in our beer, to get an idea of how it will hold up with time.
Intentionally aging beer is an entirely different subject, and one that’s worth a blog post of its own. But long story short, if you enjoy beer, you’ll want to drink it closer to its release date. It’s the best way to taste the beer as close as possible to the way the brewer intended.
Can you store beer for a year?
Shelf Life by Style – As we mentioned before, the variety or style of the beer also plays a part in its shelf life. There are various methods of brewing different beers, so the shelf life of dark beers differs from that of barrel-aged beers.
Light beers: It’s generally best to consume lighter beers, including India pale ales (IPAs), within three months after packaging. IPA beer shelf life can extend to as much as 12 months, but generally, the beer will begin to decrease in quality after the first 120 or so days, The shelf life for wheat beers and brown ales mirrors that of IPAs, and are best to drink within four months of packaging. Dark beers: Heavier beers afford a little more time before they drop from peak flavor, with a shelf life of approximately six months. This rule of thumb applies to darker beers, including stouts and porters. These beers are at their flavor peak within 180 days of packaging. Barrel-aged beers: As the name suggests, barrel-aged beers are sometimes better the longer they stay on the shelf. These beers, including sour ales and imperial beers, tend to have higher alcohol content and need time to reach their peak flavor. The souring agent in ales doesn’t stop working until several years later, which means that the beer’s taste can continue to evolve long after packaging. Oxidization ends up being a benefit for barrel-aged beers, and the barrels allow small amounts of air to interact with the beer over a longer period to take advantage of the chemical reactions.
Beers that can benefit from longer storage may also be candidates for keeping in cellars. However, it’s not possible to cellar all beers — even those with a long shelf life. Storing beer correctly is crucial, and to do that, you need to know what does and doesn’t work for a particular type of beer.
Why does beer on tap taste better?
Beer Freshness – Draught beer is loved across the nation and is the go-to choice for people visiting bars and restaurants. When you consider the product turnover at bars, pubs and restaurants, beer on tap sells a lot quicker than the bottles sitting in the fridge.
Beer freshness has an immense impact on the brew’s flavour, which is why the beer poured from a keg is likely to be fresher (and tastier) than what you’d sip from the bottle. Freshness is always important, but absolutely crucial when you love a hoppy brew, like a pale ale or an IPA. This is because hoppier beers degrade in flavour over time, so the fresher the beer – the better the taste.
If you’re a small bar or restaurant, take a look at how we can design and install your venue’s perfect dispense system, or take a look at some of the bars and restaurants that have worked with us here,
Why is beer better in a glass?
Excerpted from The Cicerone® Certifications Program’s Introduction to Beer eBook When you put beer in a glass, it reveals much more of the beer and enhances the overall sensory experience. For starters, you can see the beer: its color and clarity, as well as the foam head that forms.
As an additional benefit, when you pour the beer into a glass, some of the carbonation is lost so that the beer will contain less gas when consumed. But flavor provides the most important reason to pour beer into a glass. With the beer in a glass, you have easy access to the aroma and can smell the beer even before you take it into your mouth.
This has a significant effect on your sensory experience—so much so that some brewers carefully select the glass their beer is served in and will not accept any alternatives. Indeed, experienced tasters often describe different flavors when served the same beer in different glasses.
When a glass is selected for a beer, two factors come into play: size and shape. For routine servings of draft beer, the glass size you choose most often depends on alcohol content. While many “everyday” beer glasses hold about a half-liter or US pint, responsible alcohol service suggests that stronger beers should not be served in those glasses.
In Belgium where many beers contain 6% to 10% ABV, you’ll find a range of smaller beer serving glasses. Servings ranging between 10 – 6 oz (300 ml – 175 ml) allow for responsible service of stronger beers. The foam or head associated with some beer styles also influences glass size.
- The tall glasses used for German hefeweizens typically accommodate several inches of head when filled with a half-liter of beer.
- On the other hand, British pint glasses often leave space for less than two centimeters (one inch) of head on each serving.
- Thus beer glassware for different styles often takes head formation and size into account.
If you’d like to learn more about which glasses go with which styles, check out the Cicerone Beer Glassware Guide poster, Once a glass has been selected for the beer, it must be properly prepared before the beer is added. While consumers don’t need to be concerned about these details, you should be aware that retailers who don’t take care in these steps may present you with a beer that doesn’t look as it should.
- Generally when you are served a beautiful, great tasting beer, you don’t think a lot about it.
- You sit back, enjoy your beer, and have a good time.
- Bars and restaurants that care about great beer service take time to train their staff, maintain their equipment, and manage their beer so that every serving of beer will make the customer want to stay for another round.
To read more, purchase your copy of Introduction to Beer today!
Does canned beer go bad if not refrigerated?
Temperature does affect beer. However, it is not temperature cycling that destroys beer, but exposure to warm temperatures. Beer is best preserved when kept cold kind of like milk. A gallon of 2% will last a lot longer in your fridge than on your kitchen counter.
- Much the same way, keeping beer refrigerated will keep its flavor as the brewer intended for much longer.
- Eeping beer at room temperature can drop a beer’s shelf life from nearly six months to only a few weeks, and exposing the same beer to very warm temperatures can affect its flavor in a matter of a couple of days.
The good news? It can never make you sick. It just might not taste very good. Hop flavors and aromas will be diminished, first. Malt flavors that used to remind you of chocolate and caramel will begin to meld into a generic sickly “sweet” flavor, and in some beers reminders of wet cardboard and paper can develop.
Can beer get skunked in a can?
How Does Beer Get Skunky? – 
I love a good beer advertisement. Beers at the beach. Beers at the BBQ. Beers on the ski hill. Beers on a sunny patio. It makes you want to reach into the TV and take a swig of that nice cold beer, doesn’t it? But let me tell you, if that beer has been in direct sunlight for more than a few hours, it has likely been skunked and it’s filled with undrinkable disappointment.
- Beer skunks come from exposing beer to direct sunlight, NOT because of changes in temperature, although that’s damaging in other ways.
- When brewers add bittering hops to their brew, it releases iso-alpha acids and makes the beer bitter (as you may remember in our earlier article Hops Intro 101 ).
- The sunlight breaks down the alpha acids to produce sulfur compounds, specifically, 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol if you want to be nerdy about it.
Our taste buds are very perceptive to the sulfur compounds so it doesn’t take a lot of sunlight to ruin the beer. The reaction also occurs very quickly: 30 seconds of exposure in clear glass bottles is more than enough time to get skunky. There are a couple different ways that brewers can combat skunking.
- Packaging in cans rather than bottles prevents skunking entirely as light cannot pass through.
- However, the majority of people prefer bottles to cans, as shown by the study Bottled vs.
- Canned Beer: Do They Really Taste Different? published in Beverages journal.
- Because of this, bottles are still heavily marketed and sold in the industry.
Different glass colors offer different effects on skunking prevention. Brown bottles offer the best protection from light, green bottles offer good protection but some light does pass through, and clear bottles offer little to no protection. Seasoned beer drinkers might be wondering at this point, what about Miller High Life and their trademark clear bottles? Miller High Life, as well as some other beers in clear bottles, are made with (put simply) stabilized hop compounds that cannot be skunked.
Buy cans, not bottles If you buy bottles, make sure the display isn’t directly in the sunlight Store it in a dark, cold place or the fridge as soon as possible Use a cooler with a lid if you’re drinking outside If you’re drinking a beer that is complemented well by lime, like Corona, stick a lime in it. The citrus will mask the taste and you won’t smell it if you drink from the bottle
Written by Jan Fogg Purchasing Assistant
How long does canned beer last from a brewery?
How do you know if beer is expired? – If you’re not sure whether your canned beer is still good, there is a simple way to find out: just open one and take a sip. If it tastes fine, then all of the cans should still be good. However, if the beer has an off-taste or smell, it’s best to discard it.