it's your beer. you're entitled to do what you want to do with it. but cellaring beer that are probably not best for cellaring isn't the point of cellaring. not snobbing you or lecturing. i'm sincerely curious as to why you chose to cellar those 2. a pumpkin ale would taste like spice and be vegetal. depending on the spices they use, the spice balance would change and not necessarily for the better. i think i had the Nicklebrook beer when it came out and it tasted like a crystal malt bomb. so not sure what cellaring would do to that. i just imagine drinking a sugarbomb.Blasphomet wrote:Totally weird beers... and that's the point. 'Going about it all wrong' is a harsh description considering I've aged many different kind of beers and just don't pick up a noticeable difference. I'm not doing verticals with every beer, and I'm sure you aren't either. I just don't see the point anymore. And that's why I've quit. I find it expensive and unnecessary. Heresy.atomeyes wrote:those are 2 odd choices of beer to cellar.Blasphomet wrote:I don't know what it is, but over the past couple three years, Sami just doesn't interest me. I've stopped cellaring any beer, because I so rarely found it worth it. It gets expensive and had little to no benefit for me except for a few situations (Nickel Brook Cuvee and FM's Paranormal Imperial Pumpkin Ale are a couple I find rad after a year or two). My taste for quads and dubbels has dwindled lately... it's like all I ever want to drink are delicious IPAs, saisons, goses, porters and stouts of all kind... not sure what it is. Even had a Chimay Blue recently and just wanted something else. Maybe it's the fact that St Bernardus, Rochefort, and Chimay Blue are so readily available now... I dunno. Help me? Lol.
st berny abt 12 picks up steam after 1 year. anything longer and i find nothing happens.
orval is infinitely better 2 years after bottling.
Chimay blue - i don't buy fresh. i cellar those and wait wait wait. goal's to have them 5-10 years old. had a 10 year old one once and it was amazing.
Rochefort - don't cellar. drink within a year (arguably. i know)
stouts soften with time. Old Rasputin will be cellared a bit, most likely.
but yeah. i get the feeling you're going about the cellaring thing all wrong.
cellaring beer's sort of like cellaring wine. you cellar wine based on tannins and desire for flavours to develop. tannins mellow with time and, for example, with wine like barolo or Riesling, you get excellent flavour development with cellar time. when you're dropping $50+ for a bottle of barolo, you're not drinking it so it's a palate-neutral sipping wine. and the same would go for some beer. Double Tempest, for example, was way too hot when it came out. that beer needed at least a year in the bottle. i still have some of batch 1 that i haven't had because i sincerely think the sweet spot will be years 3-5. just a palate guess.
and it's not about doing verticals. you taste something and make an educated guess and see where the beer goes. my mentality for cellaring is this: i spend my money on what's good and what will be good. i don't drink for the sake of drinking or for curiosity. and i'd rather grab my $3.50 cellared orval in 2 years than drinkin a $7 pint of meh Ontario beer today. so my guess is that we probably spend the same annually on beer (or i may end up spending less).