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 menu. Since I’ve picked up a number of new readers recently (hello everyone!), I thought this would be the perfect time to rewrite that page. Here’s what’s going up there this evening.

Let me tell you a little story.

Like many hormonally crazed young American males, beer to my friends and I during my early adult years was little more then an alcohol delivery system in liquid form. It was a tool to let us drop our inhibitions and have some fun. Of course taste mattered to me to some degree, but when push came to shove, the quantity of beer available was always much more important the flavor of those brews. A brand such as Saranac (their Pale Ale, of course) was truly a special treat to be savored when chanced upon.

Gradually, as is often the case, things changed. As I grew older and somewhat wiser, my attitudes toward alcohol started to shift. Those long drunken evenings became rarer and rarer. Thanks to my previously unfound ability to actually hold down a decent job, I found myself able to afford and enjoy a tastier level of beer. Sam Adams became my beer of choice, and I began to make some small explorations into the craft beer world.

One winter, back in 2003 I believe, I chanced upon Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale, and instantly proclaimed it as my new favorite beer. I had never been exposed to a beer that tasted quite like that before (I know now I had fallen in love with the hop flavor). I drank a lot of that brew that season.

Looking back, I must have also talked a lot about Celebration Ale that season, and throughout the rest of the year, for that matter. As next Christmas arrived, I found myself gifted with several cases of the stuff – way too much for me to get through, as it turned out. I stashed a couple of cases in a dark corner of the basement and pretty much forgot about them. Life went on.

For the next couple of years, those cases went untouched. I remember looking at them from time to time, thinking that they must be stale or spoiled, but never really getting around to doing anything about them. In the meantime, my tastes continued to change. I became more and more aware of the craft beer scene, and first started to hear about how certain beers could actually be aged and cellared for many years.

Gradually my thoughts started to turn towards those Celebration Ales hibernating in my basement. Could they actually still be good? Eventually, on a sunny June day some thirty months after I cellared them, I grabbed a few and decided to find out.

I loved them.

This was a different beer then the one I had cellared over two years earlier. The overwhelming hoppy flavor had subsided, letting the malt base come to the front. I was struck at how smooth and easy to drink this beer was. I knew right then that I was going to HAVE to explore this beer cellaring thing a bit more.

I spent the next few weeks prowling around on the Internet. I did come across some basic info and advice about cellaring beers, but I was very disappointed in the depth of information available on the topic. Most of the info available was based off of individual experience and opinion, rather then any type of rigorous examination of the topic. Quite a bit of the information varied from source to source, and different articles often ended up contradicting each other.

This just wouldn’t do.

This was going to be up to me. I would age beers myself, and record what the results were. I would dig into the beer research world and pull out any relevant information I could fine. I would conduct my own experiments to help illuminate the areas of controversy. I would do everything I could to learn about the mysteries of cellaring beer.

So this is what brought me here, and now I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with you. I hope you have as much fun with your own explorations of beer cellaring and aging as I’m having with mine.

Jason
February 28th, 2008