Actual shelf life of dry age bags

[B]

Thanks so much for both of your replies! They were very helpful as well as allaying my worries.

Let me give some answers on some of the questions in regards to storage of the bags. They were stored within a closet and in the ziplock bag they came in. I’m in No Cal, so the weather is not humid and the temp all around is generally good. There are a few days where it may be hot, but not humid. The closet is not near any heat sources.

When I say there was air this time and it wasn’t sealing well. The whole seal in its entirely was failing. It was pretty clear it was due to the bag not melting, which is why I had to do 4+ times of re-sealing at the same spot over and over. I also tried to use some other bags I got that were never removed from the original ziplock bag. Those also had the same problem.

I have indeed had some air pockets before, but nothing major. That was a byproduct of using the channel type sealer I got from Umai dry. It could be just the unit i had, but IMHO, that sealer is of pretty poor quality. I think only once did it perform well. Other than that, it was an exercise and I ended up using things like dowels to help the air get in. The issue generally seemed to be the time between the seal and after the vacuum. Although the vacuum itself was a bit meh. I also found that when I tried to use that vacuum sealer for other things like some of the dry age steaks for fish, it also did not perform well.

I basically ended up getting a Food Saver 3200. Which works really well. So when I ran into the problem with sealing, i ran an experiment with the older sealer to see if it was just that the element in the Food Saver wasn’t burning as hot. But the result was the same.

So the meat I currently have does look like it has formed a seal. I’ll give it a few more days before i check it some more. I can post a pic of in a few days.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer my questions 🙂