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Aging Beer: Beware the Hype

jeff — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:18:13 +0000

In the beer geek community there is an assertion that beer ages well. Not just some beer but a lot of different kinds of beer. This is my single largest disagreement with a large percentage of the beer geek community. Sure there are some beers out there that age wonderfully but there are a vastly more that turn into utter crap after a bit of age. Generally any beer that showcases hops is going to not be very good after a few months. This is nowhere more apparent then with Imperial IPAs. The bigger and badder the worse they age. Yuck.

Even with beers that are intended to age, oxidation is such a huge problem that chances are greater than not that some of that super-rare-uber-ager that you have squirreled away in some dark closet is going to smell and taste of wet cardboard when you finally get around to opening it. All this from a guy that has a couple hundred bottles sitting in my basement. Unfortunately for me all this beer represents a serious chunk of change and more often than not I am disappointed with those aged beers that I do finally open. However, there are exceptions, and when a beer does age well it can be phenomenal and far outclass an un-aged sample of the same beer.

My personal favorite style for aging is Belgian Quad. Pretty much every quality Quad that I have had aged has held up extremely well and developed a new level of complexity and enjoyability as compared to unaged sample. As I mentioned earlier my least favorite style for aging is Imperial IPA. Everyone that I have ever had with some age on it, is awful. They become very alcoholic, sweet, and generally unpalatable. This makes sense given that the whole point of an IIPA is to showcase hops and hop aroma and flavor fade as beer ages.

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More Beer Bummer News

jeff — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:15:39 +0000

Bill Madden former brewer at Capital City in Arlington is stepping down as part owner and brewer at Founders in Old Town Alexandria. He is apparently leaving the brewing scene altogether to pursue some other opportunity. The new brewer is rumored to be Barbara Gerovac wife of Sweetwater brewer Greg Gerovac. I am saddened by Bill’s departure from the DC brewing scene but wish him all the luck in his new endeavors.

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RateBeer Down

jeff — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 23:55:54 +0000

Just in case any of you ratebeerians out there check my blog, RateBeer is down. The server experienced a hardware failure around 3:30CDT. Joe is working with the hosting company to get it back on line ASAP. I will post updates as I get them from Joe.

[UPDATE: 2320 EDT]
The server is still dead and the idiots at the hosting company are not helping us at all. They so far have not even hung the “Sorry server down for repairs” message as we asked them to do. In the meantime Joe has a new host lined up. Hopefully these morons will get the thing up again soon.

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Best Beer in the World

jeff — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 01:21:29 +0000

I am very active on the beer rating site RateBeer, in fact I am a site adminstrator. That out of the way I was very excited to see that Ratebeer’s recent list of best beers actually made it onto CNN! The article was linked off of the main CNN page last night and now it is featured (for what appears to be the holiday weekend) on the main CNN-Money page. The site has been a bit slow because of the huge response we are getting but it is till running.

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Trail Mix and Beer, Manna From Heaven

jeff — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:56:30 +0000

(This post is a duplicate of something that I posted to the Food and Beer Forum at RateBeer)

I am a bit of a heretic when it comes to pairing beer and food, namely I am not sure that I enjoy many beer and food pairings. Those that I do enjoy typically involve a session beer with only one or two dimensions of flavor. Bigger/More Complex beers seem to really stand on their own and demand my full attention. Sure I can drink a big Belgian Strong with some food. But I always enjoy it more alone rather than paired with food.

Then came a recent discovery of mine. It is amazing how well big, complex, beers pair with trail mix. A good trail mix is fairly complex in itself, containing various dried fruits, nuts, and sweets (usually chocolate). I was totally floored by the pairing of Trader Joe�s Anti-Oxidant Trail Mix and Loterbol Bruin. The Loterbol already exhibits a lovely blueberry character but the trail mix, which contains lots of dried blueberries, really elevated it to divine status for me. I would go so far as to say that it is was the single best pairing of food and beer that I have ever had.

This epiphany of mine was reached about two weeks ago (I waited for the emotions to die down before coming out) and since then I have been trying various trail mixes with various beers. Most results are positive.

Call me crazy but I think that these two are a perfect match.

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Aged IIPAs

jeff — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:46:00 +0000

Being a rather serious beer geek I have an extensive Beer Cellar. Over the course of the past year or so I have learned some valuable lessons on what ages well and what does not.

IIPAs are a relatively new style and as such I had no experience in aging them. So far I have yet to have an IIPA that ages well, past about 3 months. I have a theory that is purely speculation: that the quicker these beers deteriorate the less well-made they are, i.e., they relied very heavily on the massive amounts of hops to hide overall flaws.

This includes such high alcohol monsters as:

YuleSmith
Dreadnaught
90 Minute IPA

All are stellar when young but do not age well at all, especially so the Dreadnaught. Don’t be fooled by that high alcohol percentage equating to a good cellaring beer. So drink your IIPAs now, the sooner the better. Every day you wait is less hop character and therefore less of what these beers are about.

Update - After writing this post I dug up a relatively old bottle of Rogue I2PA and decided to give it a whirl. This is at least a year old, probably more like 18 months. It has held up better than the other three I previously mentioned. The hops have mellowed quite a bit and alcohol plays a more prominent role in the flavor profile, but overall it is still quite nice.

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Here we go Again

jeff — Tue, 25 Feb 2003 17:15:00 +0000

Those morons over at Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse are up to their old tricks again. First they release a “study” that tells us that the “underage”, think of the children, consume 25% of all the alcohol sold in the US. This “study” was found
to be totally bogus. Basically they interviewed 25,000 people, 10,000 of whom were under the legal drinking age. This led them to their
number of 25%. The only problem is that 10,000 / 25,000 = 40%. Umm I do not think that 40% of the population is under the drinking age, nor do I think that kids under, say, 10 should be counted either. The actual adjusted number turned out to be 11.4%. Now they have released another study that says that underage drinkers account for 19.7% of the alcohol consumed. I do not have access to the data but I would guess that they fudged/screwed up again. They do after all have a political agenda.

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