Problem? My beer cellar is growing.

I am in the same boat as you.I buy way more beer than I consume, and sharing the same market, I know there is at least one beer that drops every week that can be aged, or falls into the "buy it before its gone" column. That being said, I have stopped cellaring beer. Its just a money pit at this point, and some of the beers have gone south quickly. BCBS I had this year was horrible, I should have consumed it fresh. So now I go in to the bottle shop with the attitude that if I won't drink it this week, I won't buy it.

 

I got into the same boat, and this is how I am solving it: I don't buy another beer unless 3 come out (either I drink it, share it, or give it as a gift). This system is really works.

For the past 6 years, I host an annual party for only the guys in the neighborhood who in the past they themselves have also hosted a party at their house for the neighborhood (ie. poker parties, holiday parties, birthday parties...) It's my way of saying thanks to them for making our neighborhood a great place to live, and it gives me a chance to reduce the cellar. I pick a brewery, and I get as many beers as I can from that particular brewery for them to try and we have a massive tasting. I usually provide food, create a list of the different flights, and we start at 3pm and stop around 11pm.

This year, the brewery I chose was The Bruery. I did an inventory before the tasting, and I had 68 different Bruery beers (not counting muliples, and not counting the same beer but different years). So, I created 4 flights of 10 beers each, and we knocked down 40 different beers. They all had a great time, and my cellar gets this kind of clean out treatment every year. It really helps.

Maybe there are some folks you'd like to thank for something, and you could do the same thing?

 

This type of thread always leads me to use the unsettling term 'YOLO'.

What if something happens tomorrow that causes you to not be able to taste?
What good will those beers be then?


I have recently slowed my beer hoarding, and begun drinking beers I had been saving for some 'special occasion' that never seemed to occur... And they taste great!

 

This has been a super helpful read. My SO just shakes his head at my cellar and it's clear that we need to start drinking and stop saving for a special occasion, etc. I love the idea of a brewery themed dinner/tasting. Just kinda have to do something and it doesn't help that the fridge is full of IPAs (hard knock life).

 

I made a New Years resolution to drink up everything that I can't fit into a single wine fridge... two years ago. Still working on it. I find that I've got more velocity in the winter when I'm looking for big warm stouts, and in the summer when I'm looking for refreshing lambics. Spring and fall are fresh hops season.

One thing I can say is beers definitely start to fall off, especially big stouts. 3 year old black ops is freaking amazing, 5+ not so much. So it's in your best interest to start enjoying some of those beers you've cellared. There's something gratifying about drinking a cellared beer by yourself that you were originally planning on sharing.

 

Never heard of Fade to Black Volume 1. It looks good though. I wish I made a trade with you this year, I could of tried one !

That's a bit alarming. Were you drain pouring stouts? What happened?

 

Stouts made up a good portion. A huge part of it was how they were aged. I had a mix of beers stored in wine fridge (optimal), regular fridge (next to optimal) and closet with no light at a constant 68-70 degrees. They obviously aged differently depending on storage conditions and some stouts/beers hold up better than others.

For whatever reason some beers, even stored properly, seemed to oxidize quicker than others. Also, depending on what you think of xyz adjunct beer fresh, the adjuncts usually fade over time which I normally prefer fresh. There are a few "big" beers that I think benefit from aging because the heat tends to subside but its a personal preference and getting to know which breweries and/or beers age better than others.

Currently I'm starting to trade a little bit again. There are several beers I want to try but a) I'm done chasing for the most part, plenty of good local non hyped beers and b) I still have lots of beer left that needs to be consumed and I really don't drink that much. I say that but I did just buy a couple cases of geuze, lol, those will be fine for years to come

 

Can you post back on which beers in particular were good and which were disappointing.

 

I have the same problem. Its just tricky when traveling somewhere with a good beer scene not to spend $ on a haul. My woman keeps me in check though. Why i keep her around.

 

I'm in the same spot. The "cellar" has grown much larger than I ever anticipated. The wife is getting pissed cause I've run out of space now to even store them and there's only so many nights in a row you can break open 750's of BA stouts and barleywines ranging between 12 and 18% abv. First world problems I guess

 

Dan K, WOW, I could have written your post verbatim. I too have all the same issues and questions. THANKS for posting as I am enjoying all the feedback.

 

Buying a house so my cellar will decrease as I won't have as much spare money for buying beer

 

Usually we have less than a case on hand, but we are on our way home from Alchemist tonight with about 6 cases of 16 oz cans . We are planning on buying a small second refrigerator when we get there. (Driving 500 miles with 6 Styrofoam coolers rubbing against each other has been rather annoying.)

 

I'm new to BA. Mostly have collected wine (500+). Just starting to collect beer (probably 50bottles). Mostly like porters, stouts, ambers.

Couple of ideas.

Quarterly potluck party. You supply the beer [wine in my case], Your friends supply the food. We knock back about 8-9 bottles with about 20 people. If you feel like it, make a simple main course, or do appetizers (cheese) for when people straggle in.

Second, color code your spreadsheet so you have drinkable bottles now highlighted in a special color. Maybe use colors by type. For our wine consumption, we sort of figured out how many bottles the wife and I were drinking per year, and then tried to figure out what we would need to have on hand over the next 5 years. Turned out we had a bit of a 'hole' so we started filling that with some stuff. Now we are in maintainance mode. (CA Pinot Noir needs about 5 years aging to hit its prime, so we have sort of ongoing verticals of the wineries we like).

We did this because before we started tracking, we were 'losing' stuff in the back, and found some white wines that were both stored badly and were twenty years old, tasted like bad sherry. (On the other hand, had a great Sauvignon Blanc from 1999 that was fantastic. Not something that I would have normally tried to age.

Looking forward to vintage beers in 6 months to 5 years. If anyone has a 'starter' list they could recommend, please send it to me. [email protected]. I've got that book Vintage Beers, kind of kicked it off for me.

Also looking forward to my first visit to Toronado soon.

emike

 

Never realize how bumpy the roads really are till you have multiple foam cooler rubbing together....That is a god awful sound one of those types you can't just put out of mind....

Congrats on the haul....

 

A couple of more ideas about keeping your cellar under control:

As I mentioned, you should be color coding your spreadsheet, or otherwise keeping lists of what you have (and maybe what you want). Also important is to print out you speadsheet and keep a more or less current copy in your car.

 

1. You can look at it at the store and not buy stuff you already have.
2. you can write on the spreadsheet what you bought, and use that to update the database later.


Another thing (and I am less certain about this in regard to beer rather than wine) is don't buy stuff you don't like. While this sounds obvious, at least in the wine world, wine doesn't really get better as it ages, it just gets less tannic. At least to me, that is the main effect. If I don't like a wine when I taste it young, I'm pretty sure I won't like it later. But If I like the wine, but feel, okay I could drink this whole bottle, but I prefer to have it be less tannic, then that is a candidate for cellaring. Put another way, if the wine has an offtaste I don't like (say barnyard) then that probably won't go away as it ages, and it might very well get worse. (Okay, I'm new to beer collecting, and realize the whole hoppy degredation over time is very different. A beer if made with

 

Also, while I don't prefer the sour beers, I understand they also undergo significant change, so I've got a few of those in the beer section of the cellar as an experiment.

[Ack! hitting <tab> seems to post the message, rahter than spacing over. Really meant this to be one post. Maybe the moderator can fix it up?]

Finally, make it easy on yourself and invest in beer/wine racks that hold individual bottles. At least for me, I'm a lazy sod and if takes a bit of incremental effort to find something, I'll likely put off doing it. I also use neck hanging labels, so I can see what the info on the bottles are, while they are resting in the rack. Got those from Amazon. The racks were originally J. K. Adams ash racks, that go together like tinker toys. This was for the first wine closet under the stairs (odd shape worked well with these racks. When I ran out of room, I used another set of these to build a caster version that I can pull out of the closet to access the bottles on the walls. When I ran out of THAT room, I used another basement closet, but I built my own racks our of redwood, based on a design I saw at K&L Liquor.

For me, I couldn't do a crawl space version, if it was at all a hassle to get at the bottles. My wife does a fair amount of sorting of stuff over time.