Another great reason to cellar beer is so that you can do a vertical tasting of the same beer from different years. This is especially fun to do with beers that are dated with a year or vintage. For example, each year put away a few bottles of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot and ten years later you can taste how the beer changed over the previous decade, one year at a time. Whenever you buy a beer that you’re planning on aging, buy at least two bottles: one to put in your beer cellar and another to drink right now. Take notes on how the young beer tasted, so that you compare the two when it comes time to open the vintage bottle.
The Right Stuff
So while the total amount of beer that can be aged is still small, the number of different beers is growing, with more and more breweries making special beers ripe for being aged, leading to more and more beer lovers building beer cellars of their very own to accommodate them. The more you can do to store your beer in the proper setting, the better the results will be when you finally decide to open a bottle you’ve been aging. In a sense it’s like nurturing a child. You want to do everything you can now to raise them right, so that by the time they’re ready to come out of the bottle and live on their own in your glass, they’ve had the perfect upbringing to properly mature them.
A beer cellar sounds fancy—and expensive—but it doesn’t have to be. Really, all you need is an out-of-the-way place wherever you live that either has the right conditions naturally or is isolated enough that they can be imposed.
The ideal beer cellar is a place that’s naturally cool and fairly dry. It’s doesn’t have to be bone dry—you want some moisture, as we’ll see—but never too much. An overly humid environment can encourage the growth of mold, which, as you might expect, should be avoided.
Heat, too, is an enemy of beer. The ideal cellar temperature is somewhere between 50-65 degrees Fahrenheit—with 55-60 being the sweet spot. That’s the temperature that most British cask beer is kept at, and it’s also why UK beer is so unfairly criticized as being served warm. It is, of course, warmer than the ice-cold, near freezing, temperature that so many mainstream beer ads tout as the ideal; but that’s a myth. If you drink a beer ice cold, it actually will numb your taste buds to the point where you can’t actually taste all of the flavors of the beer. That may be fine after mowing the lawn, but for most craft beer, the goal is taste as much of the flavors that the beer has to offer as you can. And that means keeping it and serving it at the proper temperature—cellar temperature.
Perhaps more important than a cool temperature, is insuring that fluctuations are kept to a minimum. A swing of a few degrees here or there won’t harm your beer, but when you’ve got twenty-degree shifts or more in either direction you’re risking the integrity of the beer. The more that happens, the greater the likelihood the beer will be ruined. The best beer cellars can keep the temperature the same year-round. Even a slightly higher, but stable, steady temperature is preferable to a cooler one if it swings frequently from hot to cold, and back again.
The third enemy of beer is light, specifically UV rays. Keeping your beer away from windows and in the dark also retards the breakdown of hop components that turn the beer skunky, technically known as “lightstruck.” Brown glass is best, but as long as it never bathes in the glow of the sun or even an electric light bulb—and never fluorescent lighting—the beer should remain intact. Consider a dimmer switch, if you have that option, or use low-watt bulbs where possible.
In the Closet
One of the most popular rooms in the house for a beer cellar is one you may have overlooked: the closet. Depending on your home’s layout, interior closets are often idea: they’re already dark and if they’re not near windows or an exterior wall, they most likely have a stable temperature, fluctuating just a few degrees throughout the year. Stick a thermometer inside and check it every few weeks for a year. If it maintains a relatively stable temperature, look no further.
