Straffe Winter – cellaring/recapping/waxing?

Drink them. It's a faro. A strong faro, sure, but it's not getting any better. Just drink and enjoy it.

 

Yeah, I don't really see Faros getting any better with age so I'd definitely just drink them... or trade me one!

 

If you do decide to attempt to keep them (I don't see any specific reason that a faro couldn't age well if it's unpasteurized, there just haven't been many bottled faros available to try it out with), I'd be fairly wary of both those methods... it seems that any pressure in the bottle would force the remaining cork out if you attempted to cut & cap it, and you'd allow far too much oxygen in and all remaining carbonation out if you removed the cork & cage. If you did try any of those methods, I'd be prepared to drink the bottle in case anything went wrong, and additionally get the beer as cold as possible without freezing it before trying anything. You could have everything ready to attempt a cut & cap, and if that failed you could always resort to recorking and caging.

I've been messing around a bit with the idea of aging beer inside of a pressurized soda/corny keg (the kind with the large gasketed opening for cleaning)... notionally you could keep the keg pressurized with the equivalent CO2 pressure of the bottle, there would be no oxygen ingress, and no carbonation loss, even with a poor seal on the bottle. I suspect that this wouldn't be worth the trouble in this instance or almost all others, though.

EDIT: And there's no reason to also wax if you successfully cap. Wax doesn't prevent the interchange of gas if the seal is bad, but it can trap moisture which would rust the cap.

 

I think vacuum sealing is a bad idea. Think about it, normally inside a bottle there's positive pressure compared to atmosphere. The thing you're worried about is that pressure becoming great enough for the beer/gas to escape and the seal failing. Putting it inside a vacuum sealer is increasing that pressure differential, making it more likely that the seal will fail. So I think that vacuum-sealing bottles is hugely counterproductive.

How important is oxygen ingress? I used to think it was, but lately I'm not so sure.

 

I agree that vacuum sealing is not the way to go -- not only would it pull the remaining CO2 out of solution, but almost anything you could seal it in would be oxygen-permeable in a multi-year timeframe.

Personally, I only think it's potentially important in the 10+ year timeframe, though of course no real experiments have been done. If I get the keg idea going I'll call you in ten years to find out! My thought is that if the beer's still well-carbed, there's likely little to no ingress (O2 is smaller than CO2, but not by that much), and it seems to take 10-15 years for significant CO2 reduction in properly-sealed beers (I'm curious to see if this changes at all with advances in cap technology over the last 10-20 years... would be strange to open an '08 Thomas Hardy in 2040 and have it perfectly carbed!). If CO2 is getting out, O2 (being smaller) is almost certainly getting in. My original reason for thinking of the keg idea was that it would have been a nice way to keep the early 2000s wine-corked A. Le Coq / Gale's Prize Old Ale bottles from turning to crap, but they're all finally capping now anyways (though I'd love to see a brewer take the old shouldered bottles back up if people would properly store them...).

 

That was pretty much my thinking exactly. I guess I've gotten lucky, all the beers I've opened in the 10-20-year-old frame were still carbed. Hell I think I've had more 20+ beers be carbed than flat. My guess is that this problem will basically cease to exist in breweries using modern technology (at least in timeframes that are reasonable for aging beer), but of course the holdouts (cough Cantillon cough) will be more questionable.

 

I'm curious why you think that oxygen ingress could be anything other than paramount of importance. That, after all, is a large part of what temperature change, humidity, etc. is all about when it comes to aging. What could be of more importance?

 

You seem to be considering putting a lot of time in effort into aging some beers that, thus far, aren't aging very well. Do you think any of this will reverse the trend? And if not, why try any of this with beers that you think are already downhill and past prime? You'll never be able to get any evidence about whether your methods are effective or not effective, too much has happened to the original samples to make any feedback you get irrelevant.

I mean, have at it, hobbies are hobbies, do what thou wilt. But why not experiment with something fresh that you know to age well?

By far the most likely outcome is that you will find that all of these bottles already going downhill will just be in further states of downhill 3-5 years from now. As opposed to wasting them AND not learning anything particularly useful, consider drinking them and then separately conducting an experiment that might teach you something.

Just some thoughts.

 

Uh, what? First off, I completely disagree that that's what temperature and humidity controls are about. There's no real mechanism I can think of by which those changes will affect a beer with a modern cap or cork. Since corks are now sealed with plastic, even natural ones, they won't dry out, so humidity isn't an issue. Caps can rust, sure, but it would take some kind of insane rust for a cap to fail because of it, 100% humidity storage for years won't do that. Finally, temperature cycling could matter in terms of expansion and contraction, but when you're talking about cellaring swings of 20 degrees are considered large, and that's not going to do anything. Also, note that if you're concerned about temperature causing ingress in a corked beer then you're concerned about low temperatures, since an expanding cork seals better, not worse. And basically no one is afraid of storing beer too cold, as long as you're not freezing it. Caps might seal worse in higher heat, but my guess is that you're going to melt the plastic seal before you get noticeable expansion. Oh, and as jedwards pointed out above, O2 and CO2 aren't drastically differently-sized molecules, if oxygen is coming in then CO2 should be getting out, and while you definitely do encounter old, flat beers, that's been a minority in my experience, even over 10+ years.

Second, you're just completely wrong about oxygen ingress being the sole driver of oxidative staling. I know this is one of those misleading science terms, but oxidation doesn't require oxygen. Even beers made with the absolute best equipment available that gets oxygen into the PPB (or lower) range and has 0 permeability (cans) experiences oxidative stalling (and I actually have a published reference for this, if you care*). There are plenty of other ways things can oxidize, it doesn't need oxygen. And even if it did, there's still precisely 0 reason to think that ingress is more important than the oxygen that's present at bottling, because most beer we'd care to age isn't made on the super-fancy modern rigs, and so it has plenty of oxygen already in there. If the gas is at PPM oxygen we're still talking about something like a trillion atoms in there (and probably a lot more, I'm lowballing), what indication do you have that ingress is going to change flavor more than those native atoms?

So to answer your question, here's a list of things that I think are of more importance:

1) Non-oxygen-induced oxidative staling.

2) Oxidation via oxygen already in the headspace.

3) Continuing fermentation of active yeasts/bacteria.

4) Off-flavor production via pathways I don't fully understand, but which seem to be modulated by temperature (this is why I care about low temperature, to limit the energy available for bad reactions).

5) Autolysis.

But I will fully admit to not be certain. Your certainty in the other direction, however, is incredibly unwarranted.



*Here's a money shot: "From the previous considerations, it becomes clear that oxygen triggers the release of free radicals, which can easily react with many beer constituents, leading to rapid changes in the flavour profile. Among these processes are the oxidation of alcohols, hop bitter compounds, and polyphenols. […] Modern filling equipment can achieve total oxygen levels in the bottle of less than 0.1mg/L. At such low oxygen levels, it is debatable whether the formation of ROS is the determining factor in the aging of these beers. Indeed, other molecules present in beer have enough reactivity to interact and form staling compounds. Beer staling is often regarded as only result of oxidation, but non-oxidative processes may be just as important, especially at the low oxygen levels reached in modern breweries."

 

Is this beer a legit faro or was it fermented with sugar? Seems that sweetening a beer at bottling would be incredibly dumb and I don't think 3F has the means to pasteurize their beer. Or does faro describe lambic that was made with sugar during any part of it's life?

 

My understanding is that it's not a faro in the sense I've ever heard "faro" used (sweetener added after fermentation, either unfermentable or pasteurized). It was sweetened with candi sugar in the boil, which resulted in a high ABV (8%ish). I'm generally pretty unhappy about the lousy corks in SW, since it would have been interesting to see how it matured.

 

had one fairly fresh and it was amazing, somehow managed to get another. guess ill open it soon

 

Check under the foil to see the length of the cork -- the ones with the extra-bad corks only have 1cm or so of material inside of the bottle.

 

A lot of good there that was very informative, thanks. But I'm wondering why you didn't address how temperature effects the liquid inside the bottle itself, and therefore its dissolved gasses, and therefore the pressure? All of that will impact oxygen ingress/egress without touching the issue of a cap or cork.

 

I don't think that would be a big effect, but I'm not really sure. As temperature increases you get a double-whammy, the gas wants to expand and more of it comes out of solution. It looks like between 10 and 20 C you get about a 1/3 decrease in the solubility (which I naively think would be a 1/3 increase in headspace pressure, just from PV=NkT), and you'd also get about a 5% increase in pressure just from temperature effects, so the pressure could get considerably higher. But I don't really know how much that would matter. To some extent if oxygen has a path in then the pressure is irrelevant, as far as its diffusion is concerned there's nothing there. (Well, there's nothing there if you compare atmosphere, which is like 20% O2, to headspace, which is ppm or better. Diffusion only cares about the relative concentration of a thing across space, not relative pressures or anything like that. Those other things can complicate the picture, for instance by creating gradients that remain despite diffusion, but I don't think pressure is one of those things.) The increased pressure could matter in terms of making the seal fail faster, but my guess is that they have a margin of safety greater than 3/8 in there.

Unless you mean ingress in terms of the O2 being absorbed in the liquid instead of in the headspace (which wasn't how I was using it, I purely meant O2 from the outside world coming into the bottle), and I have no idea how much that matters. I'd guess that it matters somewhat, but not being a chemist I really don't know how much it matters.