Cellaring temperature

My closet gets like that too. Haven't noticed any problem yet. However, I only do stouts.

People are gonna get real anal on here and say it has to be around 55 degrees. To tell you the truth, the beer has a higher probability of oxidizing before your temp can damage it.

I also have a "cellar" at another location at 55 degrees. I keep the rare sours/stouts and stuff here. Yet, again, I really see no noticeable difference.

 

You can get small wine coolers for pretty cheap ($100 - 150 likely) and they don't take up a lot of room. I'd suggest picking one up for beers you want to keep over a year, as at 85F you're likely doing more harm than good by keeping it.

Otherwise, you can keep a few beers in the back of the fridge and they will still develop (just not as much or as quickly as at cellar temp), or don't worry about cellaring: if it's a lot of trouble to keep beers for that long, the payoff probably won't be worth it to be honest. There are enough beers that are delicious fresh that cellaring isn't really defensible from a practical standpoint

 

I don't want to be one of the anal ones. Oxidation and temperature go hand in hand. Higher the heat, the faster the rate of oxidation. Lower temps, slower oxidation. So, higher temps age beer faster. It really depends on how long you want to age the beer as JasonLoves mentioned. If this is short term, then it's all good. If you're going for years, you should cool it down a bit. More important is light. As long as your beer stays in a dark spot AND you avoid fluctuations in temp, you're good. 80 degrees is fine as long as you're not swinging from 65 - 85 everyday.

I hope this helps.

 

Yes, and is can be noted that there are a variety of processes at work when aging beer or wine. If it was just one you could age bottles more quickly by raising the temperature. But temperature affects different processes at different rates. High temps will speed up oxidative processes, and increase autolysis and its characteristics if yeast is present. High temps though won't speed the formation of desirable new esters, or the clumping of proteins that causes them to drop out of suspension, or the character of leesy-ness picked up from long rest on well-dormant yeast. Ideal cellar temperature is the place where all of these things are happening at the correct relative rates to one another. Call it anal but after a couple of years a bottle cellared warm is not chemically the same as a "the same" bottle cellared in ideal conditions. This is a fact. Whether or not you personally can tell the difference, and if so whether or not you care, is up to you.

 

My big dark kitchen cabinet which I age in is near my oven. Is this bad? I use oven about once per week.