Log In


Reset Password
Lifestyle

Brewers discover surprising results of aging beer

A wealth of flavors emerges after years of storage

DENVER (AP) – Brooks Marsted pops the cap on a 2-year-old Belgian quadrupel from River North Brewery and passes a glass to Cory Pelc.

“That’s strong,” Pelc says after taking a sip. “It is definitely starting to pick up a lot of those sweet caramel flavors and ... it tastes like plum or winter fruits.”

“It’s definitely mellowed out,” Marsted adds.

With time, the beer is evolving. This is the reward for Marsted’s patience.

“Everyone is starting to understand there’s a benefit to aging beer,” he said.

Marsted is the owner of Corkscrews Wine Storage in Denver. A self-professed wine guy, he never thought about aging beer when he opened the 5,000-square-foot warehouse three years ago in Denver.

Now, more than one out of every five of his customers are storing beer collections – in many cases, numbering in the hundreds of bottles and worth thousands of dollars – at the temperature-controlled facility.

The move toward cellaring select styles of beer, often rare and expensive bottles, is one of the hottest trends in the craft-beer world. At Corkscrews, two out of every three new customers are craft-beer enthusiasts, such as Pelc, a part-time employee.

The craft-beer industry is even beginning to cater to this upper-echelon enthusiast.

California’s Stone Brewing makes an India pale ale spiked with a funky brettanomyces yeast and suggests aging it with a “best after” date.

On the bottle Marsted opened, River North Brewery writes that it ages up to five years if stored in a cool, dark place – a suggestion that is becoming increasingly common on beers meant for cellaring, such as high-alcohol dark ales, barley wines, Belgians and sours. On other styles that don’t age well – mostly hoppy and light-colored beers – brewers are stamping an alert to buyers to “drink fresh.”

Patrick Dawson, the local author of Vintage Beer: A Taster’s Guide to Brews that Improve over Time, said aging beer is “the next frontier that people are looking for.”

“There are flavors ... that you are typically not going to encounter in a fresh beer. You are only going to get them in a beer that you age,” he said. “Once a person tries a beer that’s been aged a couple years and experiences the wealth of flavors that can be brought about from its time in the cellar, they just got hooked. That’s what happened to me.”

The increasing popularity of aged beer also is evident at Wine Storage of Denver, where owner Rachel Chaney said she is seeing a similar spike in interest for beer cellar space.

She offers an eight-case locker – which holds 96 wine bottles, or about the same number 22-ounce or 750-milliliter beers – for $20 a month. The individual units feature wooden racks that hold wine on their side to protect the corks or shelves to store beer upright, the preferred method for most bottles.

The motion-sensor lights flicked on as Chaney walked the lettered aisles on a tour as a special foam insulation and a close-looped chiller held the temperature within 3 degrees of 55 and the humidity at 60 to 70 percent. The clients can access their beer from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week with a key card.

Where the average craft-beer fan may hoard a box of special bottles in a pantry or bedroom closet, those who upgrade to off-site cellar space are often hardcore beer collectors and traders.

Chaney’s first beer client, Bill Young, bought space three years ago. The 39-year-old computer security manager keeps 1,000 bottles in his home cellar but stores 150 bottles at Wine Storage of Denver that he plans to age 10 years. He often puts aside two of every special beer he buys – usually spontaneously fermented lambics – at his storage locker, calling it a “Noah’s Ark of beer.”

“It’s conveniently far away so I don’t accidently go over and open one,” Young joked.

At Corkscrews, Stefan Levinson, 24, and his girlfriend Cate Engerrand, 24, visited their precious collection, a nearly 500-bottle locker that would make any beer lover salivate. One bottle in their stash, a 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze from 2002, recently sold online for more than $600.

“This is our savings,” Engerrand said.



Reader Comments