Rare and special beer bottles line the top of storage racks at Corkscrews, a wine storage facility in Denver. (Photo by Callaghan O’Hare/The Denver Post)
One of the hottest trends right now is aging craft beer, or cellaring special bottles. This month’s looks at how wine storage businesses are seeing this trend first hand, as craft beer collectors become their fastest growing customer base.
Patrick Dawson is the author of “Vintage Beer: A Taster’s Guide to Brews that Improve over Time.” (Photo courtesy of Dawson.)
But not all craft beer is ready for the journey. To better understand how aging craft beer works, we chatted with local author , whose “Vintage Beer: A Taster’s Guide to Brews that Improve over Time” is an expert source on the topic.
Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
Question: What are the keys to aging craft beer?
Dawson: I think the biggest thing to understand is the vast, vast majority of beers do not improve with age. To take a very special beer, to improve beyond a year or more, you need to look for beers to basically have the three “Ss.” They need to be strong, sour or smoked.
So at least 8 percent alcohol, or have some acidity, say like a lambic, or a smoked beer like a rauchbier from Germany.
Q: Are there certain styles that are best to cellar?
Dawson: When you are thinking about the strong-sour-smoked prerequisite, there are going to be certain styles that lend themselves. So in the strong category, you are going to have barleywine, stouts, Belgian strong ales. The sour beers, there’s the traditional lambic and Flanders red, but all sorts of American breweries are making sour beers now, too. Crooked Stave and Casey being great examples of local breweries that make acidic beers that improve with age really well.
Q: Are there certain conditions at which beer ages best?
Dawson: It’s going to be very similar requirements to wine. So temperature is going to be your biggest one. If a beer is aged too cold, say refrigerator temperature at 30 degrees, it’s going to age at a crawl. It will process so slow that it’s just difficult to want to wait that long.
But then too warm, let’s say 70-plus degrees, the beer is going to age too quickly. And if the beer ages too quickly it starts taking on stale flavors. Beer people call stale flavors wet cardboard … but when it tastes stale you know it’s stale. There’s sort of a happy medium in between, 50 to 60 degrees, would be that sweet spot.
The other big thing is keeping it out of light. There are compounds from hops that if exposed to UV light are going to take on a skunky flavor. A lot of people are familiar with this if you drink Heineken. It has that kind of skunky flavor. Green glass blocks almost no UV rays.
So that’s a big one, because if you are aging a beer for years, even if it’s in a brown bottle and it’s under artificial light, it can still skunk. Brown bottles block the vast majority of UV rays but still like 2 percent get through and given enough time, it will still damage the beer. So you definitely want to keep it in the dark.
And then the last one is humidity. The reason humidity is a really big deal is because of corks and not wanting to dry corks out. If the cork shrinks because it’s too dry, minute amounts of wine will evaporate out, and when it evaporates out it’s replaced with oxygen. And that oxygen will slowly oxidize the wine, basically giving it sort of stale flavors. The exact same thing can happen to corked beers.
You want to look at maintaining humidity somewhere between 55 to 75 percent, which is a tough bill to fit in Colorado. Obviously, we don’t experience a lot of humidity. Those off-site wine storage options are great for that because they typically maintain that humidity level within that space. In my cellar and most people’s beer cellars, the amount of corked beers is pretty small, so it’s not as big of a deal as the wine world.
Q: What’s in your cellar?
Dawson: In my cellar, I’ve probably got around 200 beers right now. My oldest one right now is 1972. For the most part with those beers, it’s more just fun to open a beer that old. It’s pretty unusual for one of those to actually be a really enjoyable experience to drink. More often than not, they are just going to be more muted and not just a lot of flavor.
That’s one of the things that happens to any beer that ages — the flavors sort of tighten more and more and more and that can be a good thing initially. There might be certain flavors that are much more prominent than others. So as the flavors tighten, more of the subtle nuances are allowed to come to the surface. But just given too much time, there’s just usually hardly any flavor left in it. It’s a shell of its former self typically.
Q: What are the common myths with aging beer?
Dawson: I think for a lot of people they just have not heard of the concept. The myth is that a beer cannot improve with age. That would be the big one.
A lot of times people often times ask, “Oh, did it get stronger?” They think that it’s fermenting in the bottle and it gets stronger and stronger as it ages. It does not, beyond maybe a percentage point or two in the first couple months of bottle conditioning.
One of the other myths is about a temperature swing. People get really concerned that, “This beer one time got kind of warm so it’s forever ruined.” It’s just not true. You are not going to cook your beer very quickly. It has to be exposed to warmth for pretty long periods of time at high temperatures.
People will say that the beer must be unpasteurized to age, and that’s absolutely not true. There’s definitely benefits — it’s typically going to be better for a beer to be unpasteurized or bottle-conditioned because certain off flavors can basically process out and in pasteurized beers it can’t. But there’s plenty of amazing pasteurized beers out there that have proven to age incredibly well, like Rodenbach’s Grand Cru, which is the quintessential Flanders red out of Belgium.
It just changes how it ages. It’s a sour beer and what it means is that since there is no live yeast in there, it won’t continue to get more sour. The souring bacteria and yeast have basically been killed so that will not happen. But it will continue to develop all sorts of different flavors in there.
