IPAs/DIPAs with decent shelf life

A BIG +1 to: “I am aware that it tastes sorta shitty after 4-5 months compared to 1-2.”

Why Bell’s lists a best by timeframe of 6 months for Two Hearted is a travesty.

Cheers!

 

Torpedo

 

aging hoppy beers is a rookie mistake.

 

After the DIPA's fall off, just leave them a while and they'll turn into barleywine.

 

I suspect that you are experiencing the hop fade of the dry hops. Below is from the Sierra Nevada website for Hoptimum:

“Hoptimum® Imperial IPA

A whole-cone hurricane of flavor.

Hoptimum is a hurricane of whole-cone hop flavor. Hopped, dry hopped and torpedoed for incredible hop flavor and complexity, Hoptimum is the pinnacle of whole-cone hoppiness and the biggest Imperial IPA we have ever produced. It features resinous hop varieties: Magnum, Chinook, Simcoe and a new experimental hop variety exclusive to Sierra Nevada. With intense hop flavors and aromas of grapefruit rind, pine, herbs and tropical fruit, Hoptimum is an aggressive drinking experience. Originally created as part of our Beer Camp program, Hoptimum throws down the gauntlet to all other IPAs.

Dry Hops

We work hard to get strong hop flavors into our beers and one of the ways we do that is through dry hopping. Dry hopping refers to the addition of whole-cone hops to the fermentation tanks. The addition of hops to cold beer allows the aromatic oils and resins to infuse the beer with flavor and aroma without adding any additional bitterness.”

Cheers!

 

I had a Port Mongo that was a year and a half old. It had been refrigerated for at least part of that time, but still, it tasted like it was maybe a month old tops.

 

hey, at least they're in the fridge.lol.

 

Sierra Nevada beers hold up well. I actually age celebration. Spectacular with a year on it

 

I will admit Celebration did hold up well. I found one that had gotten shoved to the back of the fridge in April and it still tasted rather good although it did not have the same hop profile it did fresh. But with that being said it was definitely not a Malt bomb.

 

Every single Sierra Nevada beer I have had at one year old has tasted almost exactly the same as it did fresh. These beers are Bigfoot (let's be honest, it's a DIPA when fresh), XXX Jack and Ken's Black Barleywine, and XXX Grand Cru. In the case of the Grand Cru, it didn't taste almost the same: it looked, smelled, tasted, and felt the exact same. Certain sections of my cellar notes turned out to be verbatim to my fresh notes when I compared them afterward. I've had bottles of Bigfoot that tasted a bit "off" around that time frame, but these were bottles whose storage conditions I could not account for. And every once in a while, there will be someone in the cellar forum who makes a comment like "I just had a 3/5/10 year old Bigfoot and it still tasted hoppy."

I have no clue how to read Sierra's bottle dates, I only know those ones above because they are/were seasonal or one-offs. That being said, in the six years of solely craft and eight years of mostly craft that I have been drinking beer, I have never had a "stale" bottle of anything from Sierra Nevada, ever. Not the Pale, not the Stout, not the Porter, not the Kellerweis, not the Torpedo. I've had bottles of the Pale that were in the middle of the town of Furnace Creek, Death Valley, at the incredible price of $15 a six-pack---due to the remoteness of the place. At that price, and in that location, it's unlikely they were fresh---and if they weren't stored in a fridge the whole time, they likely endured at least a few weeks of valley's 110F-plus temperatures. I have had bottles of the Pale that sat in my parent's garage throughout the entirety of a hot summer with daily average temperatures of 90F. Different? Maybe a little. Still hoppy? Yes.

So yeah, my bet: anything from Sierra Nevada. ANYTHING.

 

what did I tell you people. aging or waiting to drink hop forward beers is a mistake. a rookie mistake. celebration is a fresh hop ale. FRESH HOP. not put in the cellar and age. c'mon people. lol.

 

Except that particular beer is mentioned almost every winter as doing pretty well with a few years on it, by people with virtually the exact same opinion as you. I've never tried it, but it's mentioned all the time. There is more to the argument than simply "hops fade, drink now, always."

Sierra has, if I'm not mistaken, a proprietary type of seal on the underside of their bottle caps. They also use nothing but whole-cone hops. They also probably have the best method and/or equipment for minimizing oxygen exposure, as even 20 year old bottles of Bigfoot (from before they used their current bottle caps) often have little to no bad oxidation. They've also been doing hoppy American beers on a larger scale for a longer time than any other brewery in the world, have a proprietary way of feeding hops into the beer (torpedoing), are more prone to early-boil hopping than most breweries, and also have a very particular water source that's seemingly a lot harder than most breweries. And from what I've been told, they also tend to ship their beer in refrigerated trucks.

There's a lot of factors at play beyond the usual stale arguments about why hoppy beers are seriously degraded within minutes of getting off the bottling line.

 

To re-enforce what Dupage25 posted about Sierra Nevada:

· They do indeed use ‘special’ crown linings for their bottle caps to minimize the effects of oxidation (oxygen ingress under the cap liner)

· I am sure that Sierra Nevada has a ‘top of the line’ bottling & canning lines to minimize dissolved oxygen in the bottles/cans.

· For the majority of their beers they are not ‘dependent’ on dry hopping to achieve their flavor profiles

Shipping beer cold is certainly a good practice but in the overall distribution chain of the beer the shipping aspect is minor; maybe the beers shipped to the east coast were in refrigerated trucks (or refrigerated train cars) for a week? Most breweries ‘request’ that the wholesale distributors store their beers cool (refrigerated); not all wholesale distributors have the ability/capacity to refrigerate all of the product they handle.

I have no comment as regards whole hops vs. pellet hops and their water as regards to beers resisting going stale. I have never read anything that leads me to believe these are big factors in preserving beer (hop) flavor.

Cheers!

 

A trend I've noticed. The top IPA/double IPAs anecdotally "fall off a cliff" after 4 - 6 weeks, while the second tier of IPAs/double IPAs seem to hold their peak a bit longer, 3 - 5 months.

Examples of top IPA/double IPAs: Sculpin, Heady Topper, Pliny the Elder, Enjoy By (Enjoy By is an easy one, I believe the best by date is 6 weeks out from bottling)

Examles of the "second tier" IPAs/double IPAs: Celebration Ale, Racer 5, Stone Ruination (for comparison, Stone explains the reasoning for the "best by" mentioned above, and the reason Ruination is 3 months)

 

Two-Hearted definitely falls off a cliff after about 3 months

 

I had the same batch. Freaking amazing stuff. Tasted super fresh to me.

Just had a two month old Heady Topper, as a test. Tasted exactly the same, though looked a bit different.

Green Flash Imperial IPA was phenomenal. Then realized it was from end of November last year. Tasted super fresh to me (though was fridged at the store as well).

 

im not an advocate of older 2ipas but two that i had at about 80 days old that still tasted very good were
DoubleTrouble
Abrasive

 

I picked up a bottle of torpedo in a mix/match last week. I think it was about 4/5 months old. I actually found it more enjoyable than a fresh bottle. I also have two bottles of Double Trouble left from a fresh 4pack that I have pushed to the back of the fridge for now . I'm thinking 6 months or until my palate recovers from the first two bottles. Total hopbomb for me.