Cellaring questions.

I actually have a stone basement which I use. Maintains a pretty steady temperature year round.

As far as what to age, age anything you like and want to drink more of throughout the year. When I started my cellar, I added a lot of Bell's Exhibition Stout, Founder's Imperial Stout, and Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot. They were all easy to come by annual releases that I enjoyed, wanted to consume throughout the year instead of just during their release schedules, and came in formats that gave me multiple iterations of the same bottle to try over the course of months & years.

As far as how long - that entirely depends on you. Some people swoon over imperial stouts that are ten years old. Personally, I feel like most of the beers I mentioned earlier peaked around 4-5 years old and are now degrading (~6-7 years old) to the point I don't look forward to pulling them out of the cellar. Other beers, like Sucaba, I find I really enjoy around the six year mark, but then they start to fade away.

 

Welcome to the site!

My simple advice is beware of the rabbit hole that is cellaring unless you want 500 more dusty bottles cluttering your basement. I ignored the advice when I started out and regret my decision to cellar as the collection grew faster than I could drink them. Ive now enlisted neighbors as guinea pigs to help! Personally for me I found it rare that anything I squirreled away got 'better'. Different yes, but that's subjective and will be your decision to make. Perhaps start small if you're curious and go from there? Good luck with your decision!

 

Start slowly! It's been said subtly in previous posts but it's true, don't end up with cases of stuff littering your area in the next year.

Styles have been covered pretty well. Grab 2-4 stouts or lambics or barleywines you like & start sampling them about every year. If you like it? Get more. Don't like. Quit cellaring that beer. For me, it's very beer-specific. I love aged BCS but can't stand aged Expedition Stout. Love Central Waters barleywine anyways up to 10 years but there are plenty of b-wines that for me fall off after 2-3 years.

Nobody can tell you what you'll like with your palate. It'll take years to figure it out.

 

No damage. But they will age faster than they would if refrigerated.

 

I'll echo what others gave said...tread lightly. The "reward" isn't worth all the trouble, but i guess these are things you learn the hard way and if you already have 500 bottles what's 1000.

 

Just a couple things I've learned - hops drop out or morph relatively quickly, Milk stouts tend to not age as well as non-lactose containing stouts. Additives and adjuncts will all alter over time as well, so stick with the base stout/barleywine/lambic when you can. Generally speaking, the higher the ABV, the more tolerant it is to aging, but that's certainly not 100% either. It's a long road, I've found it educational and a lot of fun, provided I have friends who will help me drink my verticals. Which gets to be an issue after 6 years...

 

Like others have said, there's no hard and fast rules about what ages well and what doesn't.
But, generally speaking, higher alcohol ages better than lower, don't age anything hop forward. Darker beers do better than lighter.
Exceptions to those include sours.
Imperial Stouts, barleywines, Dubbels and Quads, often tend to do well.

 

The only thing I haven't heard emphasized enough (in my opinion) is that Lambics, wild ales, spontaneous ales, mixed fermentation, etc... is probably something that will be right up your alley if you're a wine fan. And those beers are all among the most reliable for aging.

Luckily, for you wine folks, the beers tend to be silly expensive too

 

Hey, here in Belgium beer is for normal people, although some Belgian beer nerds are pumping up snobism.
Lambiek, and beer in general, is cheap in Belgium.

 

Very good advice. My biggest problem is actually drinking the beers I have been aging.

 

From what I have heard and learned, cans are not good for aging because cans are typically filled to the top so there isn't airspace to provide desired oxidation, however lately I have found breweries are not filling the cans totally full now (assume the savings of a few ounces per can adds up). With that said, you can't see how much i in the can so not worth it.

 

That spawns an interesting (to me) question:
Suppose a can states 12 Fl Oz. I’ve typically thought of that as referring to the amount of liquid in the can, and that it does not refer to the total capacity of the can. Does that sound correct?
If in fact the quantity on the can (in this instance 12 Fl Oz) refers to the liquid, and if breweries aren’t providing ‘totally full' cans then they either need to revise the amount stated on the can, or they’re mislabeling the amount (violation of law/regs/common decency?).

I’d be surprised if breweries are intentionally under-filling there cans by a ‘few ounces’, although their might be the occasional ne’er-do-wells to do that. Irregardless, even if it became widespread, than it’s likely that the headspace would contain CO2 and not O2.
@draheim

 

I think the 12 ounce is the liquid in the can and I also think in the past they would fill all the way to the 'brim', probably easier to do, but then someone (probably a bean counter ) figured out if we save the extra XX ounces per can it will save XXX amount of money over a time period.
To clarify, I think the breweries are still filling the correct ounces, whereas before fairly recently they were probably adding a few extra ounces as it was easier to fill to top rather than measure out exactly the amount listed on cans.

 

"A few ounces" of a 12 or 16 ounce can would be a variation of 12-17%. That would be violation of TTB regulations:

Report them to the TTB.

• TTB Fraud Hotline at 855-TTB-TIPS (855-882-8477) or Contact Us Online.
• TTB's Market Compliance Office at 202-453-2251 (option 1), or by email at [email protected].