Random question What is CC La folie?

Are you asking what "CC" stands for? Corked and Caged?

 

Corked and caged was unpasteurized so it ages like any other sour. The new capped ones are pasteurized so there's no point in aging them. That's why the C&C ones are more desirable.

 

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but the significance of CC La Folie is that it's an older vintage. New La Folie bottles are not corked and caged.

 

Someone may correct me but it was my understanding that they switched from CC to capped at the same time that they switched from bottle conditioning to force carbonating.

 

I think you are correct. 09 was the last C&C I believe.

Doing a complete La Folie collection is gonna be insanely hard, the earlier vintages are huge whales and so are the special editions (ie La Folie Falling Rock, etc). Even the regular C&C are getting very tough to land, I suggest to OP that you stick with the regular capped ones (no point in aging those though, drink right away).

 

This is debatable but not the point of this thread so I won't chase it too far.

 

I believe there were much older vintages of La Folie. It's been a while but I believe I've had it from as far back as the early 2000s, 02 or 03.
La Folie was one of, if not the first American attempts at recreating the authentic Belgian sours. As such they used complex yeast innoculation, aged it extensively in barrels, and bottle conditioned with additional bugs to get a pretty astoundingly complex beer that would continue to age in the bottle just like Rodenbach Grand Cru, its idol.
Around 08 the barrel master, can't think of her name, decided that La Folie was best fresh and should be consumed the way they intended it, not the direction the life in the bottle take it over time. They also significantly increased the amount they produced (at this time it went from a small specialty product of theirs to the flagship of their new Lips of Faith line), and most importantly started flash-pasteurizing it. This major change was represented by the change from C&C, cork and cage, to normal bottle cap.
Many people, myself included, think that the older batches with the C&C were significantly more complex and certainly age mucb better than the newer, Lips of Faith version. I did really like this year's batch and wouldn't dissuade anyone from trying it.

 

They're pasteurized so there are no bugs in there to keep working. Sure, the flavor is gonna change a bit if you age it but it probably won't be significant. Definitely won't age like a regular wild ale.

 

Fair enough. I can agree to that.

 

why can't you age a beer that has been capped?

 

It has nothing to do with the cap itself, it's just that it no longer contains the wild bugs that make a wild ale age well (in my opinion). It still has some yeast to bottle condition but it's not the same as conditioning with bugs.

 

if it has nothing to do with the cap itself then your reasoning makes no sense to me. wild ales have wild bacteria in them no matter what cap it has on them. imo

 

I think the point being made is that they switched to caps at the same time they also started pasteurizing, so capped bottles will definitely age differently than the C&C bottles because of the pasteurization.

 

As previous posts have mentioned, La Folie is now pasteurized.

 

1. The capped bottles also happen to coincide with pasteurized bottles - that is, all capped bottles are pasteurized, and all of the C&C bottles were not
2. When a beer is pasteurized, it kills all of the remaining living organisms in it. I don't know if La Folie is pasteurized and then bottled with some additional yeast to bottle condition, or force carbonated - if the former, it then probably has some living REGULAR yeast, but no "wild bacteria".
3. The point being - it has nothing to do, specifically, with the type of cap - it just so happens that when they changed caps, they also changed something else.