In our last post, I dived into what inspired me to get into beer as an enthusiast and, in this post, we’re going to talk about clearing of beer and various styles. Enjoy!
After a year of beer mania, I now have 100 beers aging upright in a closet at the rear of my cabin where the insulation isn’t very good. I keep that room closed off anyway unless I have AirBNB guests so the temperature is around 50 degrees and a few of my white wines are in that room as well. It’s dark with no windows, cool and not very humid at all. I made a mistake by storing some of my initial beers sideways in my wine rack in a room that was about 65 degrees and those beers didn’t go bad but they did start to turn after 2-3 months. Oh, I’m skipping ahead, Let’s talk about aging!!!!!
Aging beers is not cut and dry. I’m still not an expert so I suggest starting with this Beer Advocate document. Cellaring beer is really only possible on beers with high ABV (alcohol by volume) and those beers are almost always corked and almost always bottle conditioned (meaning they contain active yeast in the bottle). Bottle Conditioned beers actually will get stronger over time but you can age most high alcohol beers. Anything above 7% is ripe for aging. Your budweiser should be consumed as soon as possible but a Belgian Trappist beer should be placed in the basement for 5-20 years because the beer changes in a huge way and may even be worth thousands of dollars. There are many of my beers that can be used as collectors items and sold if I ever want to. My new bottle of Sam Adams Utopias is put out every 2 years and I’ve seen 2002 bottles on eBay for $2500. It’s a serious thing but beer is meant to be consumed but aging for a year is a nice way to add a new flavor to the beer. It’s easy to find out which style of beer ages well but the ABV test is usually a good way to cheat. Most Imperial beers (stout, porter, ale) are fine and so are Barleywines and Belgian Dubbel, Tripel and Quadrubbel (sorry for the spelling) are perfectly find for aging. For me, I usually go off the ABV and 7% and higher is fine. The higher the ABV, the longer you can age it. I have 7% beers from some craft breweries like Stone or Rogue and even a 15% beer from Dogfishhead (their 120 Minute IPA) and Sam Adam’s Utopias is at 27% but already pretty aged so anything else you do is just icing on the cake when it comes to pre-aged beers.
There are certain temperatures that you can take into consideration when aging but I haven’t met anyone that keeps their beer at different temps and most of them just store at 55 and forget about it. The lighter beers like lager and pilsner should be stored at colder temps like 40-45 and heavy bottle conditioned beers from Belgium should be stored around 60. To be honest, I just keep the entire room at 55 and it’s perfect and acceptable. You can drink some of the dark beers at 55 but I’ll throw it in the fridge two hours before drinking and it’s good to go. If you store beer in a fridge thinking the cooler the better, you’ll shorten the life of the beer to it’s normal life of 3-6 months and accelerate the removal of carbonation. I know cellarers that store their beer in a fridge that’s on the lowest setting so a constant 55 is achieved and that’s fine but keeping a beer in your fridge reserved for food is bad and not advisable. If you have a basement, keep it there in a dark area or in boxes and just wait a few years. If you’re in a small apartment, buy a small wine fridge, set it at 55 and then don’t open it for 1-5 years and that’s all you have to do!
Light can ruin your beer worse than heat. If your house is at a constant 60 degrees, that’s fine for aging but if it’s being kept in a room that’s always lit, then you’ll have problems. Ultraviolet light is the worst so my advice is keep the beer in boxes that are sealed and in a closet that’s fairly dark. I have a crawl space behind my closet in an unused bedroom that’s pitch dark and the beer stays there. A consideration among beer enthusiasts when buying beer is how long it’s been sitting on the shelf in a very well lit liquor store. If you want to keep the beer for 20 years, I suggest asking nicely to buy a bottle out of the storeroom that’s still in its case from the brewer. This way, a minimal amount of light has hit the beer and you will have better results over time. There’s nothing worse than buying a beer that’s been skunked from light and heat and then holding on to it for 20 years as it gets worse and worse. $9 isn’t too expensive but if you knew all along the beer was long gone, you would have not bought it but there’s just no way to tell. Rule of thumb is, light and heat kills beer (and wine for that matter) and that’s why beers are in darker bottles. Some of my belgian ales come in bottles that are painted or wrapped in foil so no light gets in even on store shelves.
Corks versus Caps is a debate among the wine and beer world and it’s one that may never end. For beer, it’s actually considered irrelevant if the beer is corked or capped with a bottle cap that lets minimal oxygen move through. For aesthetics and comfort, I prefer corks but it really doesn’t matter. Beer ages well either way and, you don’t store beer on its side despite the chatter about corks drying out which isn’t a huge problem, you store beer upright to avoid sediment and yeast leaving a ring on the side of the bottle which makes for a nastier drink once you do finally pour it out. Since you store beer upright and since the cap versus cork argument is moot, you really should just buy beer for the label and not for how it was bottled. Rarely is a 375ml bottle going to be corked but you can age it just as long as a 750ml bottle from the same brewery.
Next, we’ll talk about tasting beer, collecting beer, reselling beer to collectors and the community around beer on sites like Beer Advocate and Rate Beer along with a few mobile tools to make the experience a lot more fun.
If you’re looking for more inspirations, check out the Cellaring Beer forum on Beer Advocate.
Finally, this video shows a guy’s home cellar that’s pretty decent and well organized. This is the sort of hobby I’m talking about in this post: