Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam. Here, a cold, fresh beer is tasty at all, but have you ever tried one that's perfectly aged in a beer seller? That's right. Just like wine collectors age their wine, more brew enthusiasts are dabbling in the art of aging beer. In some cases, the multi year old beer tastes subtly better. In other cases it's entirely undrinkable. That's the fun of this increasingly
popular hobby. You the beer ager, become part of the beer production process. Ingredients in certain beers can change with age, giving beer collectors the freedom to play with flavors and tweak beers to their liking. But we spoke with Eric Dunaway, lead beer buyer for Jungle Gym's international market, which sells more than four thousand different types of beer in southern Ohio. He said, the beers we want to age are beers that, for one reason or another, may develop in interesting ways
as time goes on. Multiply vers may change or develop, Fermentation flavors may increase over time, and if the beer is in fact barrel aged, that may become more apparent when bottle aged. True beer aging is more than simply throwing beer on a shelf and forgetting about it. It's a science. It takes practice, experimentation, and the willingness to mess up and start over again. That said, there are some ground rules when it comes to aging beer. It's best to avoid aging hoppy beers like I. P. A
S because hops are quite volatile. Dunaway explained the aroma and flavoring that hops provide to a beer are actually a result of the most fragile elements of the hops. The hops will be the first thing to sort of fall apart in the beer. You should drink these beers as fresh as possible. The beers that do age well fall under the wild beer's category. This includes anything aged by wild organisms think Flanders, reds Lambix, and American wild ales.
That's because those wild bacteria and yeasts bring interesting things to the party, and they're already a little funky to begin with. Multi beers like quads, barley wines, and imperial stouts are also good candidates for aging because those malts can develop in interesting ways. Sours are also good candidates because they tend to get more sour as they age. The beer will change depending on several things. It's style, complexity, and flavors. Some beers will become more dry, while others
will taste yeastier and become more complex. Alcohol content plays apart two, and the higher the alcohol content, the more likely a beer is to maintain its original characteristics or to develop well over time. I think seven percent alcohol bi volume or higher. But all that being said, aging even a great candidate beer, is tricky. According to Dunaway, there's no hard and fast rule for when an aging beer is ready to be consumed. It comes down to
trial error and unfortunately a lot of wasted beer. Dunaway said, if all you want to do is drink a tasty beer, then there's no need to age beer at all. Just drink all the fresh beer you want. The purpose of aging beer is to gain a better understanding of how beer works, and beer aging is like a grown up science experiment. Dunaway recommends buying multiple bottles of the same beer, drinking one fresh bottle, then logging notes about the fresh one so you can revisit and compare tastes with the
other aged bottles in the future. He said, if you only buy one bottle, of something and you age it for two years, while it might taste awesome, but you have no idea if it changed or not, or if it changed for the worse. And this beer log doesn't have to be pen and paper. Yes, there's an app for that. Beer. Seller List and seller h Q capitalize on the beer aging trend with user friendly interfaces that
make beer organizing easy. You can add personalized beer reviews and scan in new brewis with the upc to keep tabs on what's working and what's not. Some d i Y beer collectors swear by color coding methodologies, using specific stickers for each year to track when brewis were purchased and more importantly, when they're ready for drinking. Unfortunately, there's no set signs for when an aged beer is ready.
You can age some beer for months, some beer for years and even decades, but Dunaway does have a few timeline tips to keep in mind. Quote. Among the styles of beer that are age worthy, some are more age worthy than others. If you have a Belgian Triple that's two years old, I wouldn't think anything of that. It's probably still drinking great, but I don't think it will last a decade On the other hand, I've had English barley wines that were fifteen years old and we're still fantastic.
Just like wine, aged beer needs to be kept in mild conditions, not too hot, not too cold. The latter slows down or halts the aging process. Instead of stowing bottles on their sides, like many wine collectors, you should store beer bottles upright to avoid unwanted flavor manipulations. Dunaway said, if you turn it on its side, all of that yeast is going to settle along the entire side of
the bottle instead of being concentrated at the bottom. This changes the surface ratio of how much beer is exposed to the yeast. You can end up with some weird things where the yeast starts eating sugars that it otherwise wouldn't. You end up with bottles that are overcarbonated or take on weird fermentation flavors, And dear listener, I can tell you that one is correct from the personal experience of aging a festive ale that wound up tasting like a
fur net. But hey, even a climate controlled seller apparently has nothing on the ocean floor. In Fittish divers uncovered crates of intact wine and beer from a two year old shipwreck on the floor of the Baltic Sea. The result, the wine tasted fresh with clear acidity, and the beer frothed up perfectly, indicating that the yeast was somehow still alive. Today's episode was written by Stephanie Vermilion and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's
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