A beer cellaring success.

For a long time, I was intrigued by the idea of cellaring beer.  I’ve always tended to like most wines with some cellar time on them, sometimes a substantial amount, so I assumed I would prefer aged beer as well.  Experimentation, however, has not borne this out.

Like most things I do, my experimentation was broad-ranging and pretty controlled.  I selected likely candidates – barley wines, old ales, lambics, dubbels, quads, etc. – bought fresh beer from quality stores, and let them rest in my cellar (the old coal storage room in my house – below grade, dark, and with a temp. range of 57F to about 62F over the course of a year), and sampled them at regular intervals.

I learned a lot, and don’t at all regret the experiments, but the core principles I picked up were: (1)  I prefer most beer, even “age-worthy” beer, fresh by a wide margin; and (2) apart from very hoppy beers, most beers don’t change much over the course of a year or two under my storage conditions.  So, these days, the beer portion of my cellar is down to about 30-40 beers, consisting mostly of: (1) New Belgium La Folie; (2) Cantillon Lambics (3 – 5 years); (3) Bell’s Expedition Stout (fresh, or 3-5 years); (4) Unibroue Maudite and Trois Pistoles (2.5-4 years) and (5) an oddball assortment of things with which I’m still experimenting.

I opened one of those experiments last night, Jolly Pumpkin‘s Oro de Calabaza, and received a real treat.  Jolly Pumpkin is a pretty unique brewery – it ferments in open vessels, ages completely in old oak barrels, and then bottle conditions its beers.  While some breweries might do one or even all of these processes for some (usually a small, experimental portion) of their production, Jolly Pumpkin does it for all of their beer.

Oro de Calabaza is a Belgian-inspired golden ale (think Duvel), that picks up some wild yeasts during Jolly Pumpkin’s brewing process.  Wild yeasts tend to eat different (and more!) sugars than “cultured” yeasts, and tend to work somewhat more slowly.  This bottle of Oro de Calabaza has been in my cellar for about a year, and upon opening it had a nose led by the tell-tale horseblanket aroma of brettanomyces, one of the more beer-friendly wild yeasts (it gets into wine sometimes too, where it quickly crosses the “interesting backdrop” to outright fault pretty quickly for most – it works well for my nose and palate in beer though).  Underneath were a rich malt base, and some light candied-fruit notes.  On the palate, the wild yeasts once again left evidence of their work in a thinner body and extremely dry finish (body and residual sweetness come to a significant degree from complex sugars that “cultured” yeast can’t eat, but wild ones can).  This made the beer even more food-friendly, and it was a terrific companion to my super-nachos made with pork from Hinkebein Farms (via Fair Shares ) that I braised in a broth made from my own homemade chili powder.  Oro de Calabaza has definitely moved from “cellaring experiment” onto my short list of beers that, for my palate, improve with some time in the cellar.