Do people commonly create verticals of the Coffee variant? The regular BCBS verts seem to be a fairly common exercise, and Coffee is the only other Bourbon County brew created annually. Searching on the forums yields the gamut of opinions on if the coffee fades faster than a beer snob's interest in a BMC-only bar, or still retains itself over 1-2 years. Sometimes there are occasional ISO:FT's for vintage Coffee, but people typically are looking for the current year's offering.
People don't like to age coffee beers because the coffee fades with time. I had a BCBCS '10 recently and it tasted great to me.
OP, you're probably referring to my comments in the cellaring forum. On Saturday, a few of us got together and did a BCBS vertical/horizontal with everything going back to 2006. For whatever reason, I was still sitting on a 2010 and 2011 BCBCS, and we included those in the tasting. I think we were all surprised the 2010 still had some coffee even after 2.5 years. It had definitely faded, but there was still coffee flavor and aroma. I believe most of us liked the 2011 Coffee the best out of the three years - it was absolutely fantastic! With that said, I don't think it's very common to include vinatge BCBCS in tastings.
I suppose there' no better time to open my '10 - '12 bottles then Any BAs in Mass. interested in taking part?
That's good to hear, I realized I was still sitting on a 2011 BCBCS and was fearful that it had dropped off too much.
I've always had the mentality that worst-case scenario, even if the coffee is completely faded, you have a vintage bomber of BCBS. It could be a lot worse
I actually just did this exact vertical about two weeks ago, and '10 BCBCS won. There were 7 of us, and the consensus was 10 > 12 > 11, but all of them were really good.
I was at a tasting last weekend with all of them. It was interesting to see the differences in coffee used and the overall aging on the older bottles.
Hasn't been decided yet. Could be any time in the near future. Probably not at my residence though - ISO: someone volunteering their place
Coffee seems to fade kind with a half-life of sorts. i.e. after a year it's 50% gone, after 2 years 75% gone, after 3 year 87.5% gone, etc, etc. I'm totally spitballing numbers and timeframes, but that's the general idea that I've noticed. You never lose coffee completely, it just fades.
Exactly this. I've still got a couple coffee verticals to see what they do.They're great fresh. They're not great from about 6 mos to a year (the coffee gets a little stale), and then the coffee seems to taper enough that it's more a nuance than a flavor. And that's when it gets good again.
I have a BCBCS vert going. I've had it fresh and aged numerous times and I prefer it with at least a year on it. In all fairness HUGE coffee brews that taste like nothing but harsh, bitter coffee really aren't my thing. I love the way coffee brews mellow and let other tastes and smells shine with a bit of time on them. Just my $.02.
