The Brew Basement

One of the things that happens when you spend eight months writing on a blog is that your writing tends to get a little better. It really pains me sometimes when I read my earliest writings, and one of the worse offenders in my mind is the “What’s going on here…” page on the top [...]

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. [...]

Here’s the latest updates to my tasting notes. For this round, I’ve updated the notes on nine different cellared brews, encompassing a pretty wide range of styles. Here’s the links - starting with the first four that held up the best.
Unibroue 15th Anniversary Ale - Big fruity flavors showing no signs of slowing down, fantastic!
North [...]

Happy Valentines day! Here’s some recent cellaring links from around the web.
It’s another mention of beer cellaring in a major publication! This time it was the Washington Post with an article called Brews That Stand The Test of Time by Greg Kitsock. Good stuff!
Great brewers get to have all the fun. In this case the [...]

It was another mixed bag of results for my latest round of six-month tastings:
Weyerbacher Blithering Idiot - Six months have been incredible for this beer. The huge sweet flavor has calmed down and made this into a an extremely drinkable beer.
Schneider-Weisse Aventinius - Another brew that’s just too easy to drink. Still very flavorful and [...]

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 [...]

That sure didn’t take long.
It was just this fall that archaeologists told us about their discovery of an ancient alcoholic chocolate drink that was brewed thousands of years ago in Central America (Be sure to check out Zythophile’s take on the story). Wasting no time at all - they must have started planning as soon [...]

Name: Monster Ale
Brewer: Brooklyn Brewery
Style: English Barleywine
Vintage: 2007
Cellared On: January 3rd, 2008
Original Tasting: January 18th, 2008
Coming inside from a cold January evening, I had one thing on my mind - the case of Monster Ale I had picked up a couple of weeks earlier. I knew I needed something to take the chill out of [...]

Sorry about the lack of updates here over the past few days.
Internet access has been a bit hard to come by in the Tucker household since I spilled a glass of water directly on my wireless router. Never fear, a trip to CompUSA tomorrow should take care of the problem!
I should resume posting tomorrow night, [...]

I recently received the following email from a somewhat despondent reader:
I’ve just read your article on bottle conditioning on Brew Basement.
I wondered if you had any advice/comments on the storage of bottle
conditioned beers.
Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky, but from the few dozen of these I’ve
drunk in the last couple of years, 40-50% [...]