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 great attention to the humidity levels of their storage areas, and there’s no reason we beer geeks shouldn’t be any different. Unfortunately for us, finding the right humidity range for storing beer is a much trickier prospect. The main reason for this difficulty is the fact that a cellared beer collection will typically contain both corked and capped beers; each of which has a different optimal relative humidity level.

Don’t let your caps get like this!

Let’s take a looked at corked beers first. Or rather, let’s take a look at corked wines and champagnes first, since standards for the long-term storage of wine are much more firmly established right now. Functionally (as far as I know) there isn’t too much difference comparing your average beer cork to your average champagne cork, so I think it’s fair to say what’s good for one is good for the other.

The big problem we’re looking to avoid here is a drying out of the cork. As the cork starts to desiccate (nice word, huh?) it will start to shrink. And as the cork shrinks, we run the risk of having the integrity of our bottle broken. AND if we loose bottle integrity, that means we’ll start to let in all sorts of nasty critters that can run havoc in our brew. See my tasting of Le Coq’s Imperial Stout for an unfortunate example.

Anyway, the best range for relative humidity levels when storing wine is thought to be 60 to 70 percent, although an even wider range of 50 to 75 is generally considered to be acceptable.

Unfortunately, running 60 to 70 % relative humidity in a cellaring environment might not be the best idea if you’re also aging any capped beers. I’ll be looking into this in my next article.

Jason

jason@brewbasement.com

www.brewbasement.com