Regret your beer collection?

Been working on drinking down the cellar as well. Been hovering around 500 bottles for about a year, but i have gotten smarter and dont buy something that i dont plan to drink immediately unless it is like bcbs or sour where i wont mind having it in a few years. It is all about drinking the BS and not letting it just take up space...if you dont love it send it to the drain.

It can be tough to break the buying habits and drinking the BS that you arent even sure why you have it, but if you grab a meh bottle when looking for a beer you will get there sooner than you know. Realize where you are with your cellar and work on it...bring beers with you when you go out and pop them with whomever.

 

Back when I first started in the beer world, I had a ton of beer I was cellaring. It got to a point where I realized it just wasn't worth it to me, so I drank everything I had cellared.

 

My cellar is a mess from other things we have accumulated over the 24 years we have lived here, beer and wine storage is just a part of it. maybe a 1/6 of the area.

I have been working on drinking down my cellar and it is under 300 bottles of beer, under 100 bottles of wine. But it is still a mess, and like y'all, I have noticed some of the beer I cellared has gone downhill and shoulda been enjoyed much sooner. Not very many, true, and many have really blossomed, but it is ridiculous to have to go through the mess to find what I am looking for. I still haven't found one of the bottles I know is there and wanted to bring to my group's stout night.

Anyway I am having a cellar cleaning party and we all are gonna clean out the general crap from the cellar into a dumpster I'm gonna rent while we open and drink any/all the beers I/they want from the collection (not the wine, wife would kill me). If we finish them all I will be happier for it.

From here on I am gonna fill the empty spaces in the wine racks with lambic and that will be my cellar. No more cases stacked amid the disorder

 

So glad I started a cellar a while back. While I only have like 75, I'm going through a divorce right now so money for new beer is tight. Just head down to the basement fridge and pop something tasty. Just hope I can drink it all before the wife takes half

 

Make sure her half is all Triple Bock and I'd say you'll come out ahead.

Do you like shoegaze? 'Cause I like horror fiction, Tolkien, and dusty old ales.

 

Numbers 3 and 5 are why I have been trying to get my cellar down. I have also found that, for my tastes these days, I like the freshness (crispness?) of non-cellared beers.

 

I think there is a certain cycle of being a beer geek and regretting letting your cellar get out of hand is one of the steps.

I went through a period where I was trying to trade away a bunch of stouts and other assorted beers that I just never find a special occasion to drink (i.e. Dark Lord). Some of my buddies turned to * to move large chunks of their cellar (cause trading only adds cost). My cellar is slowly becoming mostly sours (lambic, Bruery, etc) and bourbon county.

At least 25-50% of the beers in the basement I wish I never bought, but such is life.

 

That sounds like hoarding instincts taking over for a while there, which can happen pretty easily with building cellars up.

I always have a cellaring plan when I buy beers. I use the formula: # cellar bottles = # bottles/week I plan to drink * average # weeks cellaring to come up with a 'target' size that I maintain. It will go up 30 bottles but then I'll basically put a freeze on purchases until it's back down to the target size.

PS: My target size is 100-125 bottles.

 

I liked your post in sympathy not in happiness of your situation, just for the record.

 

I feel like we would be best friends...

I started off buying everything and throwing it in the cellar. I've learned over time what works and doesn't and have started to get rid of what doesn't age well and have moved mostly to lambics and wild ales as well as a handful of barlewines, stouts and a few quads. I'd say about 90% of what is in my cellar has good to great reviews in regards to older bottles. Just be smart and don't buy a bottle just for the hell of it.

 

After 5 years of cellaring I have found what works and what doesn't for my tastes. I really think twice about adding a bottle and moved past the "I need to cellar everything" phase. I had a few cellar clearing parties this past summer,and that helped bring it back to a more manageable level. For me I try to keep it between 150-200 bottles, and I really need to keep on top of it to keep things from dying in there.

 

I have a couple hundred bottles down there, plus homebrew, and I think it's a bit out of control. Partially due to my organization - or lack thereof. I was going through it the other night and found a few things that shouldn;t have ended up down there, they should have been in the drink it now area.
oh, well. I'll still pop then and see what we have.
I have cut back on buying lately, trying to drink what's down there.
Of course, with all the new interesting releases out there, and new breweries, that;s not possible to completely stop buying... as long as I drink more than I buy, its OK.

 

I can sympathize completely. The only reason I have been able to avoid the trap you are in is that my beer cellar is not my first collection and I learned with other, less perishable things that I tended to get carried away and so developed ways to avoid over collection. Thus far I've managed to keep my cellar limited to about 6 cases or less (and at least one of those is typically a seasonal that won't last more than about a month). It also helped with the collector "bug" when something someone said in one of the forums a few years ago became part of my mindset. I don't save a beer for some indefinite special occasion in the future, I save a beer to make a poor day into a special occasion.

Good luck with finding a workable solution.

 

I.....don't know what to say to this. "Oops" maybe?

 

Don't regret it, yet. Like a lot of people I am slowly trying to drink it down and not buying more for cellaring purposes although a few have ended up there as the fridge is full.

Ideally the money spent earlier on is money that won't need to be spent now as you drink it down. Should be a wash.

 

I totally hear you OP. I did not even have a sizeable collection (at peak it was around 90 bombers, and 70 12ozers), and yet it took me a year of dedicated drinking, if it may be called as such, to bring it down to around 24 bombers, and 24 12ozers. Needless to say, it has not been very kind to my waistline...and the problem is aggravated if you have no friends to share it with, since all those calories now go straight into you. Well at least it was an experience. I have now come to realize that there are many brews that are as good as the very best, that are readily available on the shelves, year-round, and I don't necessarily have to seek or hoard as much as I used to.

To solve your problem...as one poster has already suggested...trade away quantity for quality that should help. Not saying it is going to be easy on the wallet, but hopefully it is the closest to a win-win in the given situation.

 

Good honest post. I don't have regret. A couple years ago I somehow amassed 300 bottles in fairly short order. Two times I have done drunk that thing down to a hundred or so only to overstock again. It's a good problem I suppose. I haven't had many bottles taste bad. I bring bottles to gatherings and they are usually a hit.

I think I have honed in on a good strategy for me. I buy several annual releases and I drink most by the time the next release comes out, all favorites I like to enjoy throughout the year. I only keep a few longer for kicks. Well over half my cellar is annual favorites. I guess that means I don't really age beer. I probably have 50 beers that I only have one of.

The other part of my cellar control strategy......I was chatting with a couple at a bar recently. We were both out of towners and they were buying a bunch of beers to take home. We got on the topic of having a lot of beer and not drinking it enough and saving it. I told them what I decided to do a while back......I pull a beer from the cellar every Sunday. It forces me to drink the stuff I have been saving. Those perfect occasions don't need to come.....just drink great beer. This helps me keep the cellar down and actually enjoy the beer I buy. If I really like something I buy more the next time.

I still save wine too long.

 

Sounds like a great excuse to have an epic party... I'd be there if I was a couple hours closer.

My commercial beer storage isn't too bad (though those bottles of 1986 Thomas Hardy probably need attention) but I have drain poured quite a few kegs of homebrew that just weren't moving. Our problem is mostly with wine; many bottles get opened way too late and a pricey bottle turns out to be senile crap.