Avery Barrel Aged series

I wonder if Avery recommends a certain limit on cellaring time for their BA beers. Some breweries - Boulevard comes to mind - put a "best by" date on even their big barrel beers.

 

ISO : Barrel aged stuff posted in thread! Let me know if you have to trade

 

That's spelled Eremita 6

 

Avery does not support cellaring their beers.

 

This.

Is fact... I find it funny but that's what they say. There was a cellaring interview from Focus on the Beer that interviewed a few Avery folks and that was their feedback.

 

I think most breweries want you to drink it now and buy more later. I'm alright with that myself.

 

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Avery does not support cellaring our beers.

In that interview, the biggest thing Truck and I tried to get across was that each person should do whatever they want with their beer and have fun with it. It's just worth noting that Truck and I, after over a decade in the beer industry, are trained to find and dislike oxidation. A vast majority of beer folk out there enjoy some of the oxidative flavors that we've been trained to dislike, and that's fine. Human beings' palates are different both subjectively AND objectively. There are flavors that Truck is great at tasting that I happen to weak at and vice versa. And there are flavors that he likes and I don't (chile beers) and flavors that I like and he doesn't (most Brettanomyces-influenced beers). We're also trained to find and dislike diacetyl, even in tiny amounts. But a vast majority of the population likes diacetyl... it can be an appropriate flavor in beer and other foods. If you ever want to know what it smells like, open up a Chobani yogurt and take a big whiff. I can smell an open Chobani if someone opens one up from ten feet away and it immediately triggers my beer training, but that doesn't make diacetyl or Chobani a bad thing.

I think that there are definitely beers that can improve over time, but it's a much smaller group of beer for me than most. During a tasting for the Calibration Dinner we do up at the Vail Big Beers Festival, I was amazed at how well our '09 Samael's is doing. I never would have thought I'd enjoy a four year old beer that much.... it didn't pick up much trans-2 oxidation at all. Definitely more in the sherry/madeira realm. I would have guessed it was a year old, no more than that.

As for the one-off releases, we simply don't yet know how each one-off release will age, so we'd be reluctant to put "best by" dates on each one. I can guess how each one will age based on previous experience, but I'd hate to be as wrong as I would have been on that '09 Samael's. And wild and/or sour beers age very differently than all-Saccharomyces beers. The low hop content definitely helps, as oxidized hop flavors are the least desirable of oxidative flavors to me. Wild and/or sour beers don't fall off anywhere near as quickly for me. That being said, I wouldn't necessarily say that our bottled and wild beers will improve much in the bottle (unless you prefer oxidative flavors). We've had those beers aging for so long in the barrels that all fermentation should be done, and we're not set up to do a secondary refermentation in the bottles here. So our goal is to make the best beer we can, then get that beer in the bottle with the minimal amount of oxygen and try to get it stabilized as well as possible. Because of that, I think our wild and sour beers are holding up very well for at least 18 months, but after that I feel like some of the flavors start to mellow out. Brabant, for example, has definitely lost some of its red wine aroma and Brett-influenced vibrancy. But after almost five years in the bottle there's only a hint of typical trans-2 oxidation. For a five year old beer it's holding up remarkably well, but I think it was probably best in those first 18 months. And I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who prefer it at 3 years instead of 18 months, which is just fine.

But I'm also that guy that would rather have 1-week old Mephistopheles than 1-year old, so my tasting notes on these beers might not match up with yours. That's half the fun of drinking beer with other people and talking about it, right? We just bottled this year's Meph yesterday, though, so maybe I'll set myself up with a blind vertical next week and see what I really prefer... you learn so much more from blind tastings. Maybe I'll prove myself wrong in a blind tasting and I'll end up preferring the older versions.

In any case, the training stuff we put out for our sales folk and distributors will frequently have our best estimates on aging our bigger beers. While that might not match up perfectly with how Truck and I prefer our beers, we definitely agree that they are great guidelines for a vast majority of the folks out there. Could we impose our aging preferences on everyone else? Perhaps, but we certainly aren't objectively right... we can only tell you what we prefer, and that's influenced by our individual palates as well as years of training. Even in our smallest blind tastings around here we never want to make major decisions based on one person's palate. With a trained group, any single palate is weak, but a group can be very strong.

So if you want to age some Reverend or Uncle Jacob's, do it. Absolutely. Just do your best to keep them cold at all times... aging a beer at 40F will result in a kinder and gentler oxidation than in your 60F cellar. If that extra beer fridge is out and all you have is the basement, then drink 'em on the early side. I'll stand by that one objectively. Unless you're dealing with refermentation in the bottles, keep everything as cold as possible.

Well, that was enough rambling, but hopefully that clears things up a bit. Off to a good ol' fashioned morning beer tasting...

 

Andy - apologies if my off the cuff comments caused the ramble, there was no offense intended. I may have been too flippant in my comments but that was the impression I got (that you guys preferred fresh bottles vs. ones with any age - including Hog Heaven and other styles typically considered very cellarable).

As with all of your posts - thanks for the additional info. Love your beers and your passion.

Cheers.
Scott

 

No apologies needed, Scott... you're all good. No offense was taken at all. And I tend to ramble both on and off the interwebz. Sometimes in public talks I have to ask people to remind me what I was talking about before I started a 3-minute ramble.

You're definitely right that Truck and I will almost always prefer a fresher bottle. But I just wanted to point out that much of that is professional taste training and personal preference... we are not about to tell other people that we know the absolute right way to taste beer. We say on a lot of our bottles that these beers can be aged and I think those guidelines are great for a vast majority of the folks buying those higher-alcohol beers. I just wanted to give a little more explanation for why Truck and I prefer one thing while many people will prefer something else. We're so sensitive to those oxidative flavors that they will simply overwhelm anything else in a beer, which means that we have a lot of trouble getting through it to find other characteristics. A 3 year old Hog will taste almost identical to a 6 year old Hog for me... it will simply taste like oxidized hops and everything else is so far in the background that I can't get to it. The 6 year old will just have more of it. But if you've tasted a bunch of 4 year old Hog and that's the sweet spot for you, that's great.... you should drink what you like, and everyone's palate is different. We have a bunch of guys at Avery that have big beer cellars and are having a great time with it.

But to explain what it's like after a bunch of professional training... think of some taste that's very pungent to you. Maybe habanero peppers. It doesn't matter whether you added one pepper or five to your pilsner, it's going to taste like those peppers and the nuances of the beer will be lost. That's what oxidative flavors can be like if you've been trained to find them. It's the same thing for diacetyl and acetaldehyde for me... my palate is not exceptional, but I've had a lot of training in those compounds so they stick out.

But then again, that Samael's '09 had very little of those bad oxidative qualities... it's picked up more of the sherry/madeira oxidation, which I don't mind in small amounts. And because our bottling line is very good at keeping air out of the bottles, it's held up very well.

Anyway... beer is fun to drink and talk about. That's why we do it so often