How important is controlling variations in cellar temperature?

The longer you intend to age the more crucial the right temperature is. I also think that daily cycles are more important the yearly ones. Your setup sounds really similar to mine, and I'm not overly concerned (though I am considering building a little styrofoam insulation enclosure to moderate the daily swings a bit more).

 

Going to hop on this for sake of not creating a redundant thread -- how large is too large of a daily fluctuation?

The space I'm storing in is a pretty constant 62-65 oF over a daily cycle, but should I be worried about finer control than that? Strongly contemplating buying a refrigerator/controller for "cellaring" but haven't yet and want to be sure my spaces for storage aren't suitable before I sink that cost.

 

I don't believe anyone really knows the answer. My guess is that's fine. That's pretty stable, although a tad warmer than ideal.

 

Do we have any idea what works best for aging beers? I know that wine cellaring is well-understood, and there's certainly a tradition of lambic aging to glean some insights from (and stuff like English strong ales, I suppose), but a lot of this is new territory over all. It makes sense that consistent temperature is good, but I don't know how tightly controlled will matter -- especially when you're dealing in a beer without brett and bacteria, as its yeast won't actually work after reaching equilibrium.

I have no idea. I wonder if anyone does.

 

I really don't think anyone does. It doesn't seem like there was really any systematic inquiry into this at any point. All we have to go on is what's been done in the wine (and champagne especially) world. But in general I think that the longer you're aging the more strictly you want to adhere to "55 degrees, no temperature fluctuations", just based on the fact that flaws take some time to accumulate.

 

In wine cellaring, the daily cyclic temp shouldn't vary more than a degree or two, some wine cellars boast that their cellars keep a constant temp, never varying a degree over the course of a year, whereas some people (Michael Mondavi of Mondavi Wines) have a varying cellar that goes with the seasons (a few degrees warmer in the summer and a few colder in the winter) and they adjust the temp slowly with the change of seasons... they say it helps the wine somehow... I guess I should say that I cellar my beer like I do my wine (I actually store my beer in my wine cellar) and have had some older vintages (6+ years old) that have come out of the cellar beautifully (I drank a Mikkeller 2008 barley wine was wonderful the other week). Bottom line is consistency, then as the beer gets older, temperature (I feel) is more important, this is not to say that you can hold a beer at 80F and expect it to be great in a year... That being said, I (am not a professional) feel that keeping your beers in the mid-seventies is a little high, especially if they are getting up in years. Maybe insulating as Stupac2 has suggested is a great investment.

 

I use my parents basement for cellaring. Simple stone and dirt basement that averages around 65 degrees. However, when the furnace/ac is on it'll change a few degrees + or -. I have only been cellering for about a year but no issues as of yet.

 

No more than a 15 degree variance in yearly temperature is optimal. The colder the average temperature the slower a beer will age. Very difficult to do this in a natural cellar. There are other variables to consider such as beer style, alcohol, bottle conditioning, amount of light, color, and size of bottle. Bottom line is to cellar as best you can, learn as you go, and enjoy.

 

I don't believe that temperature fluctuations matter nearly as much for beer as they do for wine. The issue for wine is specific to the seals on the bottles -- because they are vapor-permeable, the changes in temperature (which correspond to a change in the pressure differential between the interior and exterior of the bottle) produce a movement of gas & vapor through the cork, which accelerates ullage and can damage the wine (this phenomenon has been extensively tested in the wine world). Beer typically has a gas-tight seal, and so there is no egress of vapor, and fluctuations in temperature (as long as they don't exceed reasonable temperatures overall) should not significantly impact the beer.

In a general sense I agree that the best thing to do is to store beer as close as possible to "optimal" wine storage conditions, if only because we know from experience that it preserves beer well. That being said, I've had beer that was "aged" in conditions that would have utterly have destroyed a bottle of wine (uninsulated outbuilding of a bar that probably got up to the high 80s F every summer, for 10+ years) and it beat several similar bottles in a blind test (this was all mid-90s Thomas Hardy's).