Transcript
For most of time, most beers produced have been produced with the intention of drinking them fairly quickly after they are done brewing. There are some beers however that have been aged in their process and they are specifically the Belgian Lambics. Now recently there has been a lot more interest in aging beer.
A lot of serious collectors will age beer, a lot of serious beer bars will and what you are looking for there is looking for more flavor and complexity to develop through the process of aging. Not all beers are good candidates for aging I would venture to say most are not. What makes a good beer for aging is a strong beer, you want a beer with a higher AVB and again these are guidelines and there are always going to be exceptions but in general you want a strong beer . Hobs are okay in a aged beer it is they just has to be a multi focused beer because a lot of that hob flavor is just going to fall away.
But again Hops are a preservative so that might help the beer age better for longer so it can develop all of these complexities before it turns and actually does go bad. Again when you are choosing what beers to age not a whole lot is known about how and why certain things work. We are still figuring things out. So there might be an experiment where you know you have access to an older bottle of beer and say a few years old and you are familiar to how that beer tastes fresh. It is a great experience to taste what the fresh beer is next to the aged beer. I find it most often right now in the style of barley beer and what happens with that it is an extremely high alcohol content. So when you drink it fresh you have the experience of being hot from that alcohol.
But age might mellow the heat from the alcohol so that other dark fruit flavors are brought out and it can become a very smooth fine drinking experience. A lot of time qualities similar to a port. So aging beer is something that yes it is being done and it is absolutely fantastic, there is a lot of experimentation and i encourage you to try it and try some aged beer but don’t let your happy APl’s or pale beers go bad.
