Minnesota cellaring

Sorry for the double post. Itchy trigger finger.

 

Thanks for clarifying, Jon. And apologies to OP for complete threadjacking!

 

I was at a distributor not that long ago that had a few dozen bottles of BCBS Vanilla they were saving for they don't know exactly when. I was speaking to the owner who intentionally held that product to age it.

 

Ya'll might want to consider whether you're helping the OP when you take off on one of these industry-insider diatribes. Poor guy has probably checked out by now.

In case he's still hanging around hoping for some useful information germane to his situation...

I think it's interesting to see how flavors change from one year to the next. I start by...drinking. I look for cellar candidates that are easily available with complex characters to see how time affects them. Good examples for my area: Alaskan Smoked Porter, which uses a plethora of area ingredients such as local honey and Black Phoenix (thick coffee and chipotle peppers). I have the last two years of each and next year will open them and see what's up.

I paid $42 for six bottles of those two labels. Small investment so there's little to lose if the older bottles seem to have faded. Sometimes, great things happen, though. A 2009 bottle of Avery Czar turned out incredibly smooth and balanced compared to the 2011 version.

As for the whiskey barrel aged stuff - well, you're rolling the dice on an expensive beverage. It's a classic assumption that the liquor taste fades over time and I've found it true for even short periods of time on brews like Pugachev's Cobra, which improved considerably after only six months after the heat died down a bit. Other flavors like the cocoa nibs started to come out and I found myself wishing I had bought more (tho at 20 bucks a pop...)

Predicting flavor changes over time can be a brewtech's nightmare and a beer hobbyist's folly but overall, lots of fun to experience on your own. Good luck building your cellar.

 

A couple beers which are typically readily available in MN that I cellar on a regular basis, and find improve dramatically after a few years:
-North Coast Old Stock (3 years minimum, but several years is still great)
-Gouden Carolus Cuvee Van De Kaiser Blauw (3-4 years seems like a sweet spot)

I do a lot of cellaring of a variety of styles, but these are two which to me turn into something very different, and for my tastes much better. In both cases, the resulting beer is something unlike anything else I can buy off the shelf fresh, which is what makes it worth the trouble.