Expired beer - still drinkable?

If you find beer from a previous celebration in your household that has now expired, you do not necessarily have to dispose of it. You can find out how long you can safely drink the beer here.

Expired beer is not necessarily spoiled

Like many foods, beer has a best before date, abbreviated the best-before date.

• So look on the bottle to see how long the beer was or is at least still stable according to the manufacturer.
• A best before date does not mean that the food is no longer edible from that day. The manufacturer only specifies a period in which the beer is guaranteed not to be bad and taste good.
• The beer is not spoiled after this date. You can safely drink it a few months later.
• However, the older the beer is, you will have to accept losses in taste and appearance. For example, the liquid can flocculate.
• You can tell how fresh a beer is when you open the beer bottle. If the pressure is missing here, the beer already contains far less carbon dioxide than when bottled.
• You can recognize another freshness criterion when pouring the beer into a glass. If there is little foam here, the beer is probably not quite fresh anymore.
• You can still drink it. However, you probably have to cut back on taste.

In our next post, we will also focus on barley juice. There we explain the differences between Pils, Hellem, Export and Kölsch.