The Brew Basement

It sounds incredible, but that’s what entrepreneur and inventor Casey Jones claims to be able to do! His device, the “Ultrasonic Wine Ager” claims to be able to take any alcohol that tastes better aged and give it a vintage-like taste in under an hour.
After just a half hour or so, a seven dollar bottle [...]

Name: Old Guardian
Brewer: Stone
Style: Barleywine
Vintage: 2008
Cellared On: March 7th, 2008
Original Tasting: March 29th, 2008
I wasn’t sure if this brew would make to Upstate NY or not. Not every Stone offering seems to make it this far (no sign of the Russian Imperial Stout yet), so I was pretty happy to see this in my [...]

Thanks for tuning in to the second part of this series. If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the first part, Smoke’s Preservative Effect on Aging Beer.
There’s a whole host of phenolic compounds present in beer, but three are much more common the others. Phenol itself, the most basic of phenolic compounds, gives [...]

I would guess it’s no great surprise to anyone when they find out that smoked beers tend to age well. Most of us have been exposed to all sorts of preserved smoked meats, seafoods, and other products for all our lives – why should smoked beers be any different? And indeed, the differences between smoked [...]

Name: Red and White
Brewer: Dogfish Head
Style: Beats the hell out of me
Vintage: 2008
Cellared On: March 13th, 2008
Original Tasting: March 15th, 2008
One of my big regrets last summer is that I didn’t get a chance to cellar any of the original vintage of Dogfish Head’s Red and White. It sold out pretty fast here in Upstate [...]

Ethanol. It’s that wonderful little molecule that makes my wife loopy after too many strawberry daiquiris. It’s the compound that more and more of us are filling our cars up with here in America. It’s really the only thing most of us think of when we hear the word “alcohol”. I say most of us [...]

Be sure to check out the first part of this article which discussed the effects of low humidity on beer cellaring.
When I ended the first part of this article, I mentioned how running your beer cellar at 60% to 70% relative humidity is great for keeping the corks on your corked beers in prime shape. [...]

Are your corks drying out? Got any rusty caps on your aging brews? Maybe you even have a touch of - ewwww - mold on your bottles? Well my friend, I’ve made my diagnosis, and it looks like to me you’re having problems with the relative humidity of your cellaring space.
Wine collectors have always payed [...]

As most beer drinkers already know, hops in beer are mainly responsible for its bitter flavor. More specifically, a group of acids commonly referred to as hop alpha acids provide beer’s bitter taste (I first touched on these acids in my article All About Hops).  While there are many different types of hop alpha acids, there are [...]

Please be sure to check out the first part of this article, where I described how the oxidative breakdown of hop bitter acids leads to the formation of several smaller acidic products.
The 1979 paper by Williams and Wagner (mentioned in the first part of this article) studied how the cleavage of hop bitter acids over [...]