Am I wasting my time without a real "cellar"?

The warmer it is the faster they will age. From what I have read 52-60 degrees is best.

 

You need to establish what your goal in cellaring beers is first..

Do you want to have beers on hand that are out of season, or generally unavailable in your area? Do you want to save yourself a regular trip to local bottle shops? Do you want to round out certain qualities of freshly released beer that don't quite agree with you? If the answer to these is mostly 'yes', then honestly, don't worry about it. Your beers will do just fine in cardboard boxes in an interior closet.

 

people, PLEASE stop saying this!!!

if such a statement were actually true, sommeliers would be putting all their 2009 and 2010 bordeaux and burgundy in an oven just so that they will "age faster".

 

To be fair, you're both right. Warm temperatures will "age" a beer, but not in the traditional "cellar" way.

 

It's partially true, that the wines will age faster, but just because something is faster, doesn't make it better. You could probably cook a steak faster in a steamer or boiling water than on the grill, but that doesn't mean it will taste the same (or as good).

 

hmm boiled steak.

 

the point is supposedly that certain slow reactions occur when you age a beer at proper temperature, which are desirable. other undesirable reactions also occur.

at proper temp, the slow, good reactions go on their merry way, and the undesirable ones proceed even more slowly than the good ones. as you heat up the cellar temp, both of those sets of reactions speed up, but the rate of acceleration is greater for the bad ones.

so in one sense you're "speeding up the aging process," but in another you're not really doing that; you're fundamentally changing the aging process, and speeding it up. if the bad reactions overtake the good one, it defeats the whole purpose (the good stuff happens in the beer, but you'll never get to taste it, and there will be no going back).

maybe someone else has more nitty gritty chemistry to back this up, but i'm fairly certain the overall idea is true.

p.s. if you don't believe it, it's very easy to test if you can find a hot area to store some beer.

 

I think people often get confused/nervous about cellaring beers; it really isn't that daunting of a task. I can appreciate the discussion regarding the finer points of heat on bottles, but honestly ... the guy was just asking opinions on if he needed to worry about getting a dedicated cooler, or if the effort was even worth it. Cellaring beers just adds a different aspect to a craft beer drinking hobby, and it is 100% pursueable even without optimal cellar conditions. I think the best approach here is just to work with what you got, give it time, and see if the approach is adequate.

 

Extremely large assumptions here.

Reactions that require more energy to occur will see a greater rate of acceleration when going from temp A (low) to temp B (high). Good reactions and bad reactions have completely overlapping energy requirements. Cellar temp and room temp aren't that far apart when you look at the numbers.

Don't take your beer to 90 degrees. Storing your beer for too long will most likely ruin it, regardless of temp.

 

isn't good/bad overlapping itself a pretty big assumption?

it's tough (for me) to find literature on this stuff, but this article seems to support my claim (find "temperature" and there's a cited note that cardboard flavors from oxidation have a faster onset relative to other flavors if you store at higher temps).

why wouldn't the energy thresholds be different?

edit: and maybe more to the point, why don't we age beer @ 90 degrees if the thresholds are the same? surely everyone who holds onto a beer for 2 years at 50 degrees is a moron if they could get exactly the same results in 2 months at 90 degrees.

 

Well, heating a bottle also makes it more likely to leak/explode, since you're increasing the internal pressure. I might not understand the chemistry here, but I do have a handle on the physics!

 

for some reason this makes me realllllly want to put a can of ten fidy into a microwave...

 

Wouldn't that ruin your microwave?

 

There are so many reactions available to the chemical compounds in beer. There are clearly bad reaction pathways at 'cellar' temp, since every beer in a cellar eventually degrades. Most long-term cellaring is doing a disservice to the beer.

For me, I'm more comfortable with that assumption than, 'good reactions have lower energy requirements, bad reactions have higher energy requirements.' The part I see about cardboard/oxidation seems to be talking about 30C (86F). Don't take your beer to 90 degrees.

At 90F, you're introducing a lot of energy to the system. Now you're talking about reactions that were CRAWLING at cellar temp. And these will accelerate at impressive rates at 90 degrees. In my opinion, cellar and room temp aren't all that far apart - you don't see the crazy increases. You just have to be aware that the flavor profile will change more rapidly and will be slightly different. I had some numbers before, but they're on the old site...

 

I have been curious for a long time about this whole topic. It seems to have been proven that bottled wine "ages" or changes at the ideal ratio of "good changes to bad changes" at around 55-57 degrees. There has yet to be much (any?) real research done on beer in this matter, and since the collective beer community doesn't even agree on what desirable changes are supposed to be in older beers, I have a hard time envisioning how this research would even be approached. The chemical makeup of beer is not very similar to that of wine except that both contain ethanol. Nonetheless, I have had a growing suspicion that beer aged at 55 degrees will end up being very close in flavor to the same beer aged at 70 degrees, but I have yet to set up an experiment to test this.

 

Who cares about the microwave, it would ruin the beer.

 

With ten-fidy is that really a concern?