r/beer • u/Mitka69 • 3d ago

¿Question? deciphering production date

Today, April 2nd, I got myself 4 pack Warsteiner beer, brewed and canned in Germany, premium dunkel (whatever that means), roasted barley malt.

The best before date stamped at cans bottoms - 2025-04-11. I assume the date format is YYYY-MM-DD.

Given that canned beer typically has at least 12 months shelf life.... does this mean this beer was pulled like 12 months ago.

There is no production date. There is stamp A0851 on one of the cans and A0853 on the other three.

The box says A0913.

Anybody knows what these mean? How to determine when the beer was made.

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u/unrealjoe32 3d ago

It’s European, the date would be year, day, month. It’s nov. 4th.

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u/Mitka69 3d ago edited 2d ago

Are you sure? Because this is imported beer, why would they want to confuse US consumer.

Then the standard European time format is DD-MM-YYYY whereas here it starts with YYYY which is common accepted practice of “descending” date format - year -> month -> day (YYYY-MM-DD). At least it is common in software. It is actually prescribed by ISO 8601

FWIW, Wikipedia :

Official EU documents still tend to use DD.MM.YYYY but one document specifies the use of ISO 8601: "Dates should be formatted by the following format: YYYY-MM-DD."[1][2

But OK, if it is Novemver 4th, it is good news. Not some stale beer I just got :)

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u/King_of_Saisons 2d ago

The A0851 A0853 and A0913 are what time of the day they were canned/packaged