When stock goes off in storage
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Why this gets its own page
The shape of this business is weeks of making against months of selling, so most of a batch’s life happens after you stop looking at it. A product that was correct when packed can fail in storage through light, heat or time, and none of those is visible in the batch log.
What changes in the jar
- Color. Light drives it, and spices left in the jar keep contributing for the whole shelf life.
- Texture. Softening that started with untrimmed blossom ends continues long after packing.
- A live ferment. It keeps working. A refrigerated live product is not static and its shelf life is a different question from a processed one.
Storage is a decision, not a leftover
Dark, cool and consistent is the whole requirement, and it is cheap at the volumes most makers work at. It is also the thing that gets whatever space is left over, which is how a year of work ends up above a chest freezer that cycles warm, or on a shelf by a window.
Decide where finished stock lives before the season rather than after it, for the same reason the ferment location is decided early: once the jars exist they go wherever there is room.
What to do with the finding
A storage failure tells you something about your packing decisions, not just your shelf. If color is the recurring problem, the spice decision is upstream of it. If it is texture, the blossom end is. The jar on the shelf in May is reporting on choices made in August, which is why the log has to reach that far forward to be worth keeping.
Hold back a retain from every batch
Keep a jar from each batch, stored the way a customer would store it, and open them on a schedule. It is the only way to learn what your product does over a shelf life without finding out from a customer, and it costs one jar per batch. A retain opened at month six answers a question that no amount of inspection at packing time can reach, and it is the difference between claiming a shelf life and knowing one.