Old IPAs

I don't know about 5 but I've had it at 3-3 1/2 mos and it was still excellent and to me not recognizably different to my possibly poor palate. Of course there could be a be a "confirmation bias" thingie on either side of this debate.... I once found a 6 month old Sucks in the back of the fridge that was kind of hidden behind some mason jars of yeast, and it definitely wasn't the same,and palpably less good, even to a guy (me) who's predisposed to skepticism about alleged hop drop-off, so there's a drop off somewhere between about 4 and 6 months.

My favorite local bottle shop in Denver , Grapevine, dramatically reduces the price on IPAs after a couple months or so; Chris the manager sees me walking in and points me directly to 'em, as he knows enjoy a) a bargain and b) IPAs with a little age on them...

 

Sitting warm...I now have a tear in my eye too...

Temperature makes an enormous difference. Everything that's been discussed in this thread (oxidation, flavor scalping by liner materials, etc.) will slow down dramatically if the beer is kept cold. Basic chemistry: for every 10 degrees C (17 F), reaction rates double. All of the staling reactions follow this law. A beer held at 67 degrees F will stale twice as fast as a beer held at 50 degrees F.

If you are cellaring beer that has live organisms in it still producing desirable flavor changes, by all means cellar between 50-60 degrees. But if that is not the case, by all that is good and holy in the world keep your beer as cold as possible short of freezing it! It makes a massive difference. I can't express this enough.

 

yeah, if you take only one rule of thumb from this thread (or suite of rules of thumb) i think it's: "care about freshness? try to buy from the refrigerated part of the store, and refrigerate the beer once you buy it."

i've said elsewhere, i'd take a 3 month old IPA from a refrigerator over a 3 week old IPA sitting on a hot shelf.

 

The new Old Ale, an old IPA. Barrel age it, make a day of it; and, hope for a following. The rest of us will drink fresh, when possible, age as we do and remember it's only beer.

 

I hear what you are saying but the issue is that as a customer you have no idea how long that 3 month old IPA was continuously refrigerated. It is entirely possible that 3 month old IPA was stored at room temperature for 2 months (or more) prior to being placed in the refrigerator.

Cheers!

 

this is why it's important to know who you buy from.

 

You must know your retailers much better than I do; more power to you!

In PA, the principle beer retailer is called a beer distributor which sells beer by the cases. They typically have small cold areas filled with BMC type beers. The craft beers are sitting on the floor.

I can purchase 6-packs at beer ‘stores’ which are located within supermarkets like Wegmans and Whole Foods but the folks working there are basically supermarket employees (no disrespect to supermarket employees) and I have zero idea how they manage their beers.

Cheers to Pahn who has retailers he can trust!

 

You know I noticed that in the early days of craft brewing (back when they still called them "microbrews"), it was true that BMC beers were in the fridge exclusively and the new "weird" beers were always stacked on the floor or an aisle endcap. I think the retailers sort of viewed them as an experiment. That's definitely changed, and in most cases it's now the opposite, at least in Oregon. Maybe PA is a little slower At Anheuser-Busch we go to great lengths to try and educate the distributors and retailers and get them to view beer as a perishable food product, rather than this static, unchanging drink that I think a lot of them view it as.

I know craft guys do this too; although lot of the smaller guys don't have this problem as they can barely keep up with demand as it is.

 

Peter,

I have gotten to know the craft beer buyer for a local beer distributor very well. When time permits I go into the store (I typically bring some homebrew for him) and we chat. As we talk over a period of time (and he registers beer purchases) I observe that the high volume beers that he sells are 30 packs of BMC type products (which the customers obtain from the small refrigerated area). I am 99% sure that they do not refrigerate these BMC type beers for non-staling reasons but simply to provide the convenience of quick consumption. I do not follow these customers out to their cars but I would not be shocked to see 1 or 2 individuals take a can from the 30 pack to drink on their way home.

These beer distributors are typically warehouse size buildings and the refrigerated area is maybe 5% of the floor space. As a business they have to make a resource decision and I think it is a pretty easy decision for them: refrigerate the BMC beers since they are the high demand (volume) product.

Cheers!

Jack

P.S. It would be my guess that the Oregon beer market is very different from the beer market in the rest of the US. There is demand for craft beer in Southeastern PA but BMC type beers dominate the market here.

 

Pahn and Peter are truly lucky individuals! Any liquor store I go to has a very small refrigerated area, and the only thing you can count on is that there will definitely be BMC in the fridge... As a matter of fact, I was at Total Wine this past weekend when I heard someone asking a store employee if they had "Pliny the Elder" and they said "If we do, it's going to be up front at the customer service area."... In case you didn't know, that area does NOT have a fridge... If they don't put Pliny in the fridge, how do you expect to find any other "lesser" IPAs refrigerated!?

 

While not IPAs (but it's not only IPAs that suffer from age and heat, so...), Olde Mecklenburg transports their beers in refrigerated trucks and insists that retailers keep them in refrigerated coolers. If anyone sees the beers unrefrigerated, they are encouraged to let the brewery know, and they will take the matter up with the retailer. As @Peter_Wolfe rightly points out, this is absolutely paramount to freshness -- and it's another reason to love @OldeMeckbrew!

 

Come to think of it, I remember not too long ago being at a BevMo where the IPAs sit on a shelf where midday sun would shine on them through the windows...

 

well, note also, "freshness sensitive" beer is only a smallish % of my beer buying. i'm more of a barleywine / RIS guy. fresh hoppy pale ales when i can get them. when the only brand i like is 2 month old warm IPA, i leave it on the shelf and drink woodford reserve at home.

edit: and p.s. while the consumer gets more and more educated and quality conscious, the breweries themselves (and the distributors) have to react. if your tiny startup brewery is having trouble moving the 2 month old IPA on the shelf, you made a bad decision somewhere down the supply chain.

 

We generally have "cold chain" deliveries from major distributors though small breweries usually deliver direct.This probably only involves an hour or so before it's back into a cellar.

 

I drank a Stone pale ale yesterday whose enjoy by date was sometime in 2013 (October I think). I thought it tasted fine. (*I've never had a fresh one.)

Last year I was able to find several bottles of Great Divide 18th Anniversary Wood-Aged DIPA at one of my local stores, and they were delicious.

I don't like to judge a beer by it's "drink by" date.

 

I'll bet the fact that it's canned helped preserve it much more than it's bottled brethren.

 

Seriously... read back in this thread for @Starkbier's information about freshness. Cans are only as fresh as the beer going in (read: minimizing oxygen) and not all breweries are made equally. To be fair I don't know what type of canning system 21st Ammendment uses... maybe it's a top of line system like Sierra Nevada or A-B would use, but if I learned one thing in this thread, it's that one cannot just assume that cans are inherently more fresh than bottles.

 

earlier this year i drank a few cans of ob gubna from last spring (kept in the fridge) and quite enjoyed it...

 

“…it's that one cannot just assume that cans are inherently more fresh than bottles.” That is a true statement but not all bottled beers are equal from a TPO perspective either. Victory has a top of the line dual evacuation Krones bottling line (and Cheers to Victory for that) but not all breweries have top of the line bottling lines. Just like a cheapo canning line could have a TPO of hundreds of ppb so will a cheapo bottling line.

The bottom line is that it is preferable for a packaging line (canning or bottling) to have a low TPO value off the line. A bottled beer with a TPO of hundreds of ppm of oxygen will just get worse over time if they use a ‘regular’ crown liner (which permits 7 ppb ingress per day). For example, a bottled beer with TPO of 200 ppb off the line would have a 620 ppb of oxygen after 60 days. A canned beer with TPO of 200 ppb will have 200 ppb after 60 days.

Cheers!

P.S. For completeness a bottled beer with a TPO value of 30 ppb off the line and a ‘regular’ crown liner will have 450 ppb of oxygen after 60 days.

 

Vinnie would not be happy to hear this.