How to set your best before dates (or expiry dates)

[matt-cousins]

There are two types of best before date in Breww:

• A date set at the point of packaging (racking).
• A (typically shorter) date that is set at the point of delivery and shown to just that one customer. (This is optional, and most breweries don’t use this feature.)

Historically in Breww, for each beer, you would set the best before for each type of container. However, over time, this proved to be too inflexible and so Breww now allows you to define complex rules for how to calculate the best before dates that are used.

The packaging best before dates are shown on stock labels (AKA labels racking) and shown within Breww. The delivery best before dates (if used) will show on delivery labels.

Individually setting dates on each beer

When creating or editing a beer, you can set the best before date to use for each type of container (kegs, casks & smallpack). These are set as a number of weeks from the packaging/delivery date. If set, this will take precedence over any rules that you have defined.

You can also go to Settings → Production settings → Best before rules → Rules from packaging → Show overrides to view a list of all beers and their overrides.

Best before date rules (recommended)

To save you from having to set a best before date on every single beer/type of container combination, you can define account-wide rules. This saves a lot of time and allows you to make them even more specific to different situations.

To create your rules, go to Settings → Production settings → Best before rules and then choose either Rules from packaging or Rules from delivery depending on which you are looking to define.

Here’s an example of the type of rule that you could set:

You can build out your own rules using Breww’s complex rule builder. We won’t go into the finer details on how to use this tool in this guide, as we have a video guide on how to use this interface in another help guide - How to configure "Delivery rules" to automatically schedule your deliveries. If you need help using the rule builder interface, please check the video in that guide as the same principals apply to this the best before date rules.

Having built your rules, you can check the best before date that would apply to each of your products (assuming they are packaged today). To do so, use the Best before date preview button shown above the rule builder.

Additional (from delivery) best before time per customer type

It’s possible to add additional time to the best before date, depending on the customer type. Go to Customers → Settings & tools → Customer types. Then, click the pencil icon to edit a specific customer type.

Editing best before dates after racking

You can easily change the best before date on a product, either by heading to the product, or by heading to the batch actions tab on a batch.

Editing the best before on a product

You can extend the best before on a product by selecting the Stock breakdown tab and the Update best before date button .

Extending the best before date on the batch actions

When on a batch, you can select the Actions from the table at the bottom. This lists all the actions associated with this batch. You will then be able to select the Edit BBE button to change the best before date on the products used on that racking action. This is very handy for when you want to change the best before on the racking of casks or kegs, as this will allow you to update these in bulk rather than going into each product individually.

Migrating to rules

If you have been using Breww since before best before date rules were available, you may wish to migrate from setting dates individually on each beer to using rules. For a beer/type of container to switch, all you need to do is remove the date set on the beer and ensure you have valid rules in place.

To help you achieve this, you can view a list of all your beers and their individually-set best before dates. From this list, you can edit them individually, or remove the dates in one-click. This list can be found at Settings → Production settings → Best before rules → Rules from packaging → Show overrides.

Don’t forget to check the best before date that would apply to each product (if packaged today) using the Best before date preview tool.

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[alice-quintana]

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right chat but I have 2 questions regarding Best Before Dates.
1/ can I add a new type of product shelf life onto the Beers section? For example, we pack all our steel kegs with 6 months shelf life, however our keykegs have a shelf life of 9 months.

2/ if we need to manually change the Best Before Date once the kegs have been packaged (i.e. we have tested the stock and decide to extend shelf life to try and sell through), we can only change 1 container BBE at a time. Could I decide to change the BBE in bulk for all remaining containers part of one specific batch?

Thanks!
Alice

[ben-collard]

Hi Alice, thanks for your message. Currently, you can only add best-before dates to the three container type categories of Cask, Keg and Smallpack; however, I can see how this would be useful, so it would be great if you could vote on the Different Best Before Dates for Ecasks and Brewery Firkins feature request, which is for the same principle that you have described. You can override the best-before date across multiple containers by heading to a batch and selecting the batch Actions tab at the bottom. Here, you can edit the best-before dates against the racking actions, which will change the dates on the remaining containers.

[alice-quintana]

Hi Ben,
That’s great thanks for the tip on bulk editing, and I’ve just added a vote onto the existing Feature Request and have shared with my team.

Cheers!

[jon-kyme2]

Just fiddling with this. I notice that it seems to be necessary to have a “catch-all”.
This doesn’t seem to work:

So we need to add a Best Before for something neither smallpack, keg, nor cask. Which I guess would cover buckets . Have I got this right?

[matt-cousins]

At the moment, the ‘tree’ is required to be fully complete with no open ends. In this simple example it’s not necessary, but it was intended to help users avoid mistakes. I’m sure there could be some improvement to make the completeness check a bit more ‘intelligent’!

[jon-kyme2]

I understand. As it’s “intended to help users avoid mistakes”, a better error message might be helpful…

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that the rules were incomplete - given that all cases were in fact covered. Obviously, I didn’t need the “Cask” condition, but it seemed useful in a self-documenting kind of way. Perhaps some kind of non-conditional label node (?) would be useful in cases like this. Or the ability to add a label to the outcome / leaf / best before. e.g. “Then it must be cask” in my example. (have created a FR for this: Best before rules - add label to outcome - Ideas & feature requests - Breww Community)

Incidentally, the date preview does seem to work even for a tree with an “open end”. Which is a bit bug-adjacent…