It’s alive! My beer is alive!

Should you store your bottles of beer standing up, or should you lay them on their side to age?

This question has been an area of contention for some time in the beer cellaring community. Most experts would agree that all beers, even corked ones, should be aged standing up. All brewers certainly seem to say this. Beer Advocate even has an excellent discussion of this on their Cellaring 101 page, which really hammers down the case for standing beers up. However, subjective reports will filter in time to time from people who say their beer is definitely better when they age it laying down.

Is there actually anything going on here? Are these people crazy? Is there really any way that laying a bottle on it’s side improve the flavor of its beer over time?

There is definitely some potential for a beer’s flavor to change by keeping it on its side. A beer stored laying down will have more of it’s surface area exposed to the headspace, possibly allowing for a greater rate of oxidation reactions to take place. The yeast in bottle-conditioned beers will also be distrbuted through a wider range of the beer, potentially allowing the effects from yeast autolysis (see my articles on bottle-conditioning for more on autolysis) to have more on an impact on the brew. Finally, in corked beers some flavors may be able to be picked up off of the cork itself when a bottle is aged on its side. Of course, even if some of these changes in flavor do occur in beers laying down, there is the big question of whether or not these flavors will be beneficial in nature, or just help to ruin the overall taste.

This week I’ll be starting a four year experiment to try and shed some light on these issues. I’ll be aging a variety of beers, some standing up, others laying down. However, I want to make sure I explore all the different ways that laying down bottles can impact flavor development. So I’ll take some of the beers that started in the standing up position and lay them down to finish aging. Other beers that I started laying down, I’ll stand back up after some time to finish off.

I’ll post the particulars of my experiment as it gets underway later this week.

Jason

jason@brewbasement.com