Solution: A Toast To The Fallen Warriors

HINTS:

The identities of the beers are not necessarily important for solving the puzzle.
The flavortext clues that the number 3 is important. Also the month that all the dates are in is March, also cluing the number 3. The fact that 3 is important should probably be the first direct hint.
Compare the tasting notes with real details about the real beers. This hint indicates that there may be discrepancies, and something important may be encoded in the descriptions.
The details of the old man in the flavortext mirror something about the beers.
All beers have certain qualities, and all tasting notes will reference each of these qualities.
Bases other than 10. (These last 2 should basically give it away).

SOLUTION:

Directly converting the date numbers into letters gives you 'RUBYFISH':
```
  R - 18
  U - 21
  B - 2
  Y - 25
  F - 6
  I - 9
  S - 19
  H - 8
```
This indicates that the dates are a red herring, they are only there as a backup clue to the number 3 (the only month in Spring 1104 in which the numeric dates match the days of the week is March).
The puzzle word is encoded in 3 digits of a trinary code (base 3). This allows for 27 characters, i.e. the full alphabet plus a space. I have chosen the space to be 000.
Each digit position within the number describes a quality of the beer that is always mentioned in a tasting note. The bit order of most significant to least follows the order you'd notice these things when tasting a beer: color, body, hop character.
Within each digit position, the possible values are 0, 1 and 2. These are chosen to match beer quality terms in the ordering you'd expect, from "light" to "heavy", respectively as follows:
```
  Color: 0 = amber/1 = copper/2 = dark
  Body: 0 = thin/1 = medium/2 = full
  Hops: 0 = floral/1 = spicy/2 = bitter
```
The beer descriptions also clue this ordering (copper is not too light and not too dark, spicy hoppiness comes in the middle).

The answer word, "NAINSOOK", is encoded directly in trinary as follows:

Letter	Dec	Tri	Attributes	Beer
N	14	112	copper, medium bodied, bitter	otter creek copper ale
A	1	001	amber, thin, spicy	czech rebel bohemian pilsner
I	9	100	copper, thin, floral	tetley's english ale
N	14	112	copper, medium bodied, bitter	cooper's ale
S	19	201	dark, thin, spicy	DAB traditional dark
O	15	120	copper, full bodied, floral	mendocino white hawk ipa
O	15	120	copper, full bodied, floral	paulaner marzen
K	11	102	copper, thin, bitter	hacker-pschorr dunkel weisse