Best Old Ale

4D

 

U.S made old ale: Great Divide Hibernation
U.K made old ale: Theakston Old Peculier

 

Bells third coast old ale. Good fresh and ages well

 

I can not find the Better Half Curmudgeon for the life of me; if you no where I can get my hands on this puppy, let me know!

 

I put Fruet in my top 3 beers, and as you, easily the best "old ale" I've ever had.
Big fan of the style, plenty I haven't had, but it would take a mighty beer to displace Fruet.

 

Drink that bad boy tonight, it's sublime & you never know when your # is up.

 

BBA 4D is #1 by far then 2009 old stock cellar reserve then fruet. had all three side by side!

 

You're welcome.

 

Have to throw this one in because it hasn't been mentioned yet. I really enjoyed Alesmith 2010 BA Decadence

 

Hair of the dog Adam! Really enjoying batch 87.

Barrel aged- Adam from the wood, 09 bourbon old stock, 4th d.

 

jmw answered your question in post #59. Brewers occasionally cross style guideline lines and call their beer by a different, but similar style. But whatever a brewer puts on the label is not what you need to decide in your mind is actually correct by your personal definition. There is no seriousness in the 'truth in labeling' concerns. We all know what is right (or close to it) when we taste a beer.

 

All these votes for Fruet are making me regret not picking up the bottle I saw on the shelf today.

 

Cambridge Brewing Bad Knees was great.

 

Great post about the historical roots of old ale, barleywine, and mild. Not so relevant for contemporary stylistic definitions, but an interesting read nonetheless.

http://zythophile.wordpress.com/201...e-difference-between-barley-wine-and-old-ale/

 

I've had a fruet in my fridge for a year and have been afraid to crack it. Saw it at rock n brews in El Segundo tonight and didn't hesitate. Amazing beer although a bit on the sweet side. Now I can let mine age another year!

 

I'm mostly being facetious anyways. Beer styles often exist on a continuum with other styles, blurring at the edges, and stylistic definitions and expectations tend to change and evolve over time. At one point in history, old ale really was aged strong beer. Now, it's just a synonym for barleywine.

 

Surely that's a Barley Wine.

 

You’ll be wanting some evidence for these assertions. Here’s an ad for Waltham Brothers’ brewery in Stockwell, South London from 1889. You’ll note that of the four grades of X ale, three are called simply “mild ale” while the fourth, XXXX Strong Ale (with a price per barrel of 66 shillings, implying an original gravity of around 1090 or so, north of seven per cent alcohol by volume) is described as “old or mild” – meaning that the brewery would sell it to you aged or fresh. The fact that the next grade down (46/- a barrel, around 1055 OG) is called XXK, not XXX, is meant to suggest, I think, that you could use this one as a “keeping” beer if you wanted, giving it a bit of age; while the bottom two grades, the XX (around 1050 OG) and the X (probably not much above 1040 OG) were “proper” milds, meant to be drunk quickly. This is found with other brewers’ beers: Bass ales in 1892 were being advertised by one retailer in Bristol with the No 1 and No 2 called “Strong Ale”, the No 3 “Strong or Mild Ale” and Nos 4 to 7 just “Mild Ale”. I doubt, incidentally, that Waltham Brothers actually brewed four ales: most likely they brewed X and XXXX and the other two were blends, at different percentages, of those.​

However, there were milds stronger than the weakest olds, olds less acid than even the average mild, and olds with less extract than the average mild. So how did the BMJ, or, more likely, the pubs and retailers who sold it the ales for testing, decide in which category, old or mild, to put each ale? The only answer, I suggest, is that they were judging on the one parameter not given in this table: age.​

There would be a difference between beers meant to be sold young (Mild) and aged (Old). A Stock KKK would have 50-100% more hops than a Mild XXX. In all other respects they would be identical.

They probably wouldn't have blended X and XXXX to make X, XX, XXX,and XXXX. More likely they would have a basic recipe and then parti-gyle different combinations: X and XX, XX and XXXX, etc, from the same mash. This is 19th-century partigyling, so the worts would be blended after the boil to get whichever beers were wanted.

 

Except the advertisement itself clearly states that an XXXX was available to purchase old OR mild. If the old and the mild were two different beers, then why wouldn't they be listed separately? The way the advertisement is written seems to imply that the same beer was available for purchase both young and old.

 

Reading through the comments on that article, Ron Pattinson seems to agree with you. And I would trust the man who does real primary research more than myself, who just reads blog postings from guys who do that research.