Haymarket brewmaster on beer cellaring fallacies (video)
Video description: Ken Hunnemeder and Brad Chmielewski sit down with Pete Crowley in the barrel room of Haymarket Pub & Brewery. After a long stout tasting with a group of friends the three of them recall some of their favorites and discuss the issues with cellaring beers. For them the stand out beers of the night were mainly the fresher or newer beers. Most of the cellaring didn’t improve the beers. Pete shares why cellaring your beers really isn’t the best idea for a lot of beers. Although they may age for five to ten years in the bottle you are going to lose some of the qualities that the brewer wanted to achieve when they first brewed the beer. While cellaring beer can be a fun experiment, it doesn’t always produce great results.
via The Hop-Cast.
Nice discussion. I actually just grabbed a couple things out of my cellar recently, including Devil Dancer from July that turned into an awesome barley wine. I haven’t planned on storing anything longer than about a year anyway, since I don’t have optimal cellar temps, especially in the summer months. I would say anyone with a true wine cellar that stays between 45 and 60 degrees might be able to age stuff longer, but if you’re like me and it’s more between 60 and 68, keeping something for three or more years isn’t going to be a good idea. Just keep it in the fridge instead. I especially don’t see the point in cellaring if you haven’t tried the beer fresh first. If you try it fresh and notice something you’re not quite digging, like hot alcohol or a crazy hop presence that you don’t want, then aging for 6 months to a year might make sense. But if you like it fresh, you might as well drink it fresh.
Cellar aging beer is definitely something to do with extreme caution, and some of it has to to with the bottling technique and care used as well. Not all packaging lines and QC are equal. But definitely it is a hobby with a risk and reward scenario.
I’ll give one example in my cellar, I age a case of Brooklyn Black Chocolate stout each year. It definitely gets more approachable and complex in my opinion at a year, peaks year two to three, and then can start sliding away. Not an easy experiment to run with every beer you come across.
From personal experience, I have found that aging some of these beers has helped mellow out the booze and allow the other flavors to shine. I put Old Rasputin XII & XIV side by side at Christmas and the XII was FAR better. Granted, I haven’t been aging anything for more than three years.
I heartily agree with the main point of these gentlemen: Beer is for enjoying with friends, not collecting.
While I think this was a great discussion that more people should have, it comes off as being against the concept of aging beer. Pete does bring up some good points that should be considered but these are only the opinion of one person. Being a brewer, I can understand why his preference would be skewed towards fresh beer. I am interested to see what other people thought about the vertical flights they tasted. I highly doubt The Bruery’s Black Tuesday at 18/19% is better fresh than it is 2,3 or 5 years later. Some beers can age for an extensive period of time (Thomas Hardys, JW Lees, Samichlaus, Stone Double Bastard among many others) and I encourage people to explore how a beer can evolve. That’s what Craft Beer is all about anyways isn’t it? The continuous search for the perfect pint, or goblet in this case.
I tend not to trust the word of people who say ‘rare’ that many times. Plus the logic is a little non-existent in the blathering that doesn’t seem to stop. It only ages in the barrel? I’ll call up the wine industry and let them know.