Bottle Wax & Cellar Humidity Question.

In my opinion, don't wax corked & caged bottles at all (and, if you choose to, definitely don't remove the cages -- the wax won't be strong enough to hold the cork in on its own).

Wax looks nice, but doesn't really provide any benefit -- it's oxygen permeable so it won't affect how the beer ages (and for the length of time most people are cellaring beer, the seal of the cap or cork will remain effectively gas-impermeable), and it's easy to trap moisture beneath the wax when applying it. I've opened many brewery- and owner-waxed bottles with rusty caps.

 

Jedwards's answer is good, but I'm curious about what you're trying to accomplish. The humidity inside the bottle is almost certainly higher than the humidity outside, and there's not really anything on a C&C bottle to protect from rusting (which I think is typically the goal with wax, even though it does a poor job as jedwards noted), so why would you want to wax them?

 

Yeah, I wasn't trying to be combative but rather instill a holistic manner of thinking about these things. A lot of people come in here with questions that could easily be answered by thinking carefully about their goals, or about their problems and how they relate to the world.

There's a lot of cellaring misinformation out there, and I think it's largely due to the complete and total lack of expertise on this issue as it relates to beer. I mean, it's out there, but it's inside some Belgian monk's head (or whatever), there's no publications and no experiments and no authority. So the void gets filled, as it always does, with bullshit.

This problem is seriously compounded by the fact that cellaring is so deeply personal. Lots of people cite Bigfoot as a good beer to age, I think it's terrible. It makes it hard to answer questions since it's all subjective.

 

I wouldn't bother with a lot of those, but you have to figure it out for yourself. I've been lucky to be in a tasting group with a wine guy who ages beer on the side, and has a ton of old stuff. So I've been able to quickly learn some lessons that would've otherwise taken years.

My recommendations for you would be:

1) More gueuze (3F and Hanssens definitely age well and are readily available, Tilquin and Girardin probably age well but I can't confirm).
2) More English barleywine, like JW Lees. That's the only barleywine I've had with serious age on it (>5 years) that withstood it.

 

Yeah you should pick those up. One thing to keep in mind is that Quetsche is a fruit lambic, and opinions about whether or not those improve with age are highly variable. So definitely try to get two if you can.

I never had DDG fresh, but it's been great every time I've had it, so definitely try to score some of those.

 

I'd be down, let me know if you're looking for anything from here.