Lessons From a 25-Year-Old Beer

Last night a group of friends and I cracked open the first bottling of Old Knucklehead from BridgePort--a beer dating back to 1989.  Back in the day, Old Knucklehead (OK) was a wonderful tradition.  The brewery honored a local codger (some famous, some not) by putting his visage on a little nip bottle.  It combined localness, particularity, and tradition all in one lovely little package.  (The brewery would do well revive the tradition, methinks.  It's hyper local tradition and wouldn't account for many barrels in absolute terms, but it would get a ton of press and continue a beloved tradition.  It's also perfect for the social media age.)

I have no idea who's on that first bottle--I think it was a regular at the old brewery.  Labeling standards were different then (no government warning, for instance), and the ABV isn't listed.  If memory serves, OK was a relatively low-alcohol barley wine--nine percentish.  All of which made analyzing it more dependent on what our senses could tell us. 

One thing you could tell right away was the clarity--even in the bottle.  That was a good sign.  When we cracked it, the bottle let out a nice pssst, and bubbles sprang to the surface.  Old Knucklehead was bottle-conditioned, and there was a thick layer of now-black yeast at the bottom.  Bottle conditioning is great for aging beers in the shorter term--the yeast harvests oxygen while refermenting in the bottle.  But it also raises the risk of autolysis (yeast cell degradation). 

 Twenty-five years is a long time, but amazingly, the beer had little flavor of autolysis and also not a ton of oxidation.  For those who like the effect of oxidation on high alcohol beers, this was an argument for the prosecution.  A tinge of paper, but mostly a rich, sherry-like note.  There were no hops left, but the beer was not overly sweet.  Some bread pudding and raisin, but balanced by the sherry note. 

The beer probably would have been better a decade or two earlier, but it was still surprisingly fresh and tasty.  People often ask me how long you can store beer before it's a lost cause, and I've always been reluctant to answer.  My data set--like most people's--is not flush with examples.  But 25 years is quite a test.  And this bottle, which was well cared-for in that quarter-century, held up remarkably well.

Bright and effervescent after 25 years.

What Can We Learn From a Ten-Year Vertical?

On Sunday, Bill Night treated a flock of roving beer geeks to a ten-year vertical of Deschutes Jubelale--a period corresponding to his arrival in the Beaver State.  As Bill learned, NW winter warmers aren't ideal for long-term aging.  At less than 7%, they don't hold up like imperial stouts and barley wines.  But as anyone who has begun a home-cellaring project also learns, eventually you tend to let beers languish too long, and then you have a basement full of suspect old beer.  Turning his cache into a teaching moment, Bill thought it would be interesting to taste the decade of beer in one titanic vertical.

Aging Beer
So what happens to aging beer?  According to research on the subject (pdf), beer contains hundreds of molecules that

"originate from the raw materials (water, malt, hops, adjuncts) and the wort production, fermentation and maturation processes. However, the constituents of freshly bottled beer are not in chemical equilibrium. Thermodynamically, a bottle of beer is a closed system and will thus strive to reach a status of minimal energy and maximal entropy. Consequently, molecules are subjected to many reactions during storage, which eventually determine the type of the aging characteristics of beer."

Oxygen is the main agent of change, and it reacts with various compounds in the beer to produce different compounds over time.  From a sensory perspective, this means that bitterness declines as sweetness increases and there is a slow formation of caramel or burned-sugar flavors.  Oxidation, the flavor of paper or cardboard (wet paper and cardboard in the more offensive cases), and staling also steadily increase, though the rate depends on oxygen.  If the beer is bottle-conditioned, you may get autolysis (when yeast cells rupture), which tastes like soy, meat, or brine.  Another flavor, which researchers used to call "ribes"--it refers to black currant leaves, but means "catty"--flourishes for a time and then diminishes.  Beer picks up some wonderful flavors too--the point of aging them.  These are rich sherry- or port-like rounded flavors, a sense of luxurious depth, along with dark fruit notes.  My guess is that different types of beers go through entirely different processes depending on the type and amount of hops, dark malts, yeast cells, alcohol, and so on, but here's a classic diagram of what happens to light lager.

The Vertical
Generally speaking, I was surprised at how well the Jubels held up.  The first five years had the characteristic flavors of age--they were stale, sometimes slightly metallic (I noted "blood" for the '06), and a bit faded.  The aroma was uniformly good--sweet and malty, inviting.  The malt flavors survived as well, and in the '05 I did get a touch of sherry.  There was a minor quality of rough bitterness, and I wondered if this might be from hop's beta acids, which actually increase in bitterness with oxidation.

The '04 vintage illustrated one important fact of aging beer: the cellar-keeper is wholly at the mercy of the bottles, which may have been mishandled somewhere along the line.  That vintage was undrinkable.  It smelled fine, but had a briny, fishy flavor that was as offensive as it sounds.  Did those bottles get to hot at some point?  Was there a problem when they were bottled, or with the actual batch of beer at the brewery?  There are tons of factors that can affect aging beer.  When I was at Full Sail last year, Jamie Emmerson gave me some bottles of stout from the brewery's stash, and he warned that it was always a crapshoot.  Even tiny variances telescoped out over years can make a big difference.  That only one year was bad speaks volumes about Deschutes' quality control.

The latter half decade was in  surprisingly fine fettle.  I was picking up hops in the aroma of each, and they mostly seemed green and piney.  Interestingly, where the first five years were perfectly bright, the '08 and '09 were murky, and the '10, '11, and '12 were bright but had little speckles, perfectly held in even suspension.  They were about the same in '10 and '11, and about half as many in the '12.  I'd love to hear your theories on what those were. 

Bill had us rate our faves but I don't know that he tallied them.  Deschutes retooled the Jubel recipe a few years back, and that was evident in the more roasty recent vintages (another danger of vertical flights).  I think I liked the '08 the best, though the '10, which had the most hopping left, was also nice.  But the real value was observing the chemistry and seeing how the beers changed over time.

A Dissident from the Larder

After dinner at a friend's house last night, I found myself enjoying a Dissidents he brought up from the basement. I had a bottle of this not long ago from my own larder, and it was extremely sour--lambic sour, brettanomyces- ate- all-the-sugars- and-part-of-the-bottle sour. Much of the other elements of the beer found themselves shouldered aside by an austere, Sahara dryness.

So imagine my surprise when his bottle produced an entirely different Dissident. The malt and cherry had not been annihilated, but interestingly, had conspired to produce a cinnamony gingerbread quality. The sour wasn't aggressive or even insistent, and it definitely played side man to the sweeter, maltier element.

Fascinating. Wild yeasts are unpredictable, aren't they?

Doggie Claws at Six and a Ghost From the Past

As I get ever longer in the tooth, my beer cellar ever improves. I've made a concerted effort this year to start laying in good beers, but I also have scattered purchases dating back to the late 90s. Last night, to toast the new president, I broke out a couple.

2002 Doggie Claws
Confessions first: I don't love barleywines. I know this is an excommunicatable offense among beer geeks, but what can I say? To my palate, most barleywines are like music piped through speakers a few clicks of volume higher than they were made to handle. The malt is sticky and cloying, the hops shrill and overwrought--painful, but unable to temper the syrupy goo. Ah, but when they're good, they're insanely good. So it is with six-year-old doggie claws. Everything about this beer was perfect, from the head retention, which inexplicably lasted until the final drop despite the alcohol, to the aroma of gingerbread and spice to the magnificent flavor, where the malt and hops were silky rich but at the perfect volume. The malt had lost the leather quality and was more akin to something baked--spiced plum bread or gingerbread. The hops retained a lively spiciness that perfectly drew out the malt notes. I have almost never tasted a beer I would score 100 points out of a 100 points, but this had not a single flaw; better, the elements were greater than their sum. An amazing beer. I'll be laying a lot more of this away in the future.

1998 Saxer Three-Finger Jack Doppelbock
A few of you will recall Saxer Brewing, kaput since the late 90s. They specialized in lagers, and the annual pièce de résistance was Three-Finger Jack. Saxer was ahead of its time with lagers in an ale land, but there was no dispute about the doppel--we all loved it. I bought a sixer and I've been parsing it out at very special occasions.

Sadly, I think I've waited too long. It's gone beyond its prime. It was extremely oxidized and more or less flat. The original flavor was suggested, but dissipated. I was reminded of snapshots from the 70s, before they'd perfected color photography. You look at them now and they're all spotty and blurry. This is a risk with aging beer, and one to which I'm particularly susceptible. I regard the beer as too precious to drink. It's stupid, a subversion of the art, but we all have our faults. Perhaps this will encourage me to start drinking these beers, before it's too late.

Ten-Year-Old Saxer Bock

Over the weekend, I had occasion to crack open one of the few remaining bottles I have brewed the long-defunct Saxer Brewery. Back in 1998, when it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, I had the foresight to buy a sixer each of their flagship Bock, Dark Bock, and the legendary Three-Finger Jack Doppelbock. I have a friend who turned forty on the 20th, and so I dug into the larder to pull out the dusty gem. It takes a milestone like that.

Before I rave about the beer, let me again make a pitch for the beer cellar. If you've got a basement, it's easy to pull off. Beer's cheap. The Saxer I bought cost less than 20 bucks back in '98--and now I'm sure I could easily find a buyer who'd pay twice that for a single bottle. This is partly because the brewery is now defunct: Tony Gomes, the German-trained brewer, was hand-crafting among the most celebrated lagers in America (the bock won gold at GABF three years running), and we'll never taste these beers again. But also, any high-gravity beer is worth more a few years down the road than it is when you pull it off the grocery shelf. They don't always taste better--aging is an imprecise science--but when they do ... wow.

The nice thing is that it costs very little to get started. Go to the store, buy a case of assorted beer, put 'em in the basement and forget about them. Repeat each year. Before you know it, you're hauling out a bottle that's ten years old. Okay, off my soapbox.

So, to the bock. Gomes brewed this beer like it was 1873--which is to say, expensively. He used a decoction mash and aged it for--well, memory doesn't serve too well. But he left it in the tank long enough to knit owner Steve Goebel's brow. As a slight sop to the local market, Gomes over-hopped it to maybe 35 IBUs (marginally, but for a German brewer, it was enough to cause his brow to knit). The resulting beer, as I recall, was extremely smooth and rich, with just enough spice to make it inviting for my IPA-lovin' palate.

The ten-year-old version was nothing like that. It had been transmuted, alchemically, into a dense, smoky, aged thing. I find antique beers hard to describe because the palate cues are totally different. Oxidation produces a distinct flavor that either washes a beer out and turns it papery, or it melds with the malt and hops to create flavors that a younger beer never has. Saxer Bock was almost impossibly rich and smooth. Gomes' excessive hopping was wholly absent, as you would expect in a burly beer (7.2%) that never really had many to start with. As with every successful aged beer I try, my one regret is that I didn't buy more...

More on Aging Beers

Speaking of decade-old beer, don't miss this:

Full Sail brewer John Harris just e-mailed (from Hawaii, where he's vacationing --- now that's dedication...) with the news that the folks at the Pilsner Room at McCormicks and Schmick's Harborside Restaurant are tapping a 10-year-old keg of Full Sail Imperial Stout for St. Patrick's day...it should be amazing...they'll also have a keg of 2008 Imperial Stout on tap so you can do a steeeep vertical tasting.

Vertical Imperial Stout Tasting
Monday, Mar. 17th
Harborside Pilsner Room,
0309 S.W. Montgomery St
503-220-1865

Also, in comments to the aging beer post below, Bill from It's Pub Night points me to this extraordinary site on cellaring beer. It includes tips, experiments, and of course, recommendations.

How Beer Changes in Nine Years

Let us reflect a moment on 1999. I was barely into my 30s (!), and the Clinton administration was dealing with impeachment. The Dow closed above 10,000 for the first time. American Beauty won the Oscar for best picture, the Broncos won the Super Bowl, and the Yanks won the World Series. Ah, the good ole days.

In the beer world, it was also a different world. There was a company you might recall named Portland Brewing Company (PBCo to employees). It hadn't yet become MacTarnahan's, nor was it owned by out-of-state Pyramid. The brewery had recently expanded--perhaps the first step on the death knell of consolidation--buying Saxer and inheriting the Nor'Wester portfolio in the deal (both labels are now dead.) It was also during a year when Head Brewer Alan Kornhauser was overseeing Pabst's operations in China, and assistant brewer Brett Porter was manning the tun.

Porter introduced three or four really exceptional beers, and I thought the brewery might turn it around. He made a hop-oil-based pale (Oast Ale) that was vividly hoppy; an exceptional dry-hopped dry stout (Thunderhead Cream Stout, a name Pyramid approrpriated for its IPA) , and BobbyDazzler. I believe it was also dry-hopped--a preference of Porter's--but the details of the beer are lost to me. It was good enough that I bought a sixer to put away, and I now have two remaining.

I cracked one last night, and enjoyed the rare pleasure of a very nice aged beer from a kinder, gentler era.

Tasting Notes
BobbyDazzler, as was the case with all of PBCo's beer, was not bottle-conditioned. It is therefore substantially oxidized (though any 9-year-old beer would be somewhat), the effects of which come through in both in a chocolate-sherry note in the aroma, and a strong sherry character in palate. This is one of several possible results of oxidation, and the one generally forgiven by beer geeks. The flavor is produced when melanoidins in the beer become oxidized. There are other flavors oxidation can produce, generally regarded as flaws: diacetyl (a buttery flavor) which occurs when another chemical, a byproduct of yeast ( alpha acetolactate), is oxidized, and a metallic, blood-like flavor.

In the BobbyDazzler, I only pick up the sherry note, and it's intense. Combined with the alcohol, it does taste more like a liquor than a beer. There's a port quality, a refined, dry flavor that has dark fruit (plum and raisin), smoke, almonds, and woody elements. The hops are not evident individually, but it does not cloy. The aftertaste lingers a long time, in the manner of pipe smoke, roasted meat, or scotch. The more I drank, the more I liked it; my mouth became saturated with the flavor, and it lingered delightfully there for a half hour after I finished the beer.

As with all aged beers, it had transformed almost unbelievably. The sharper notes of hopping were completely gone, and the malt had been altered by oxidation. It was impossible to have a drink of the beer and trace the flavors present there back to the original recipe. It was, nine years on, a wholly different substance. The alchemy of metals may have been a bogus science, but in the transmutation of BobbyDazzler, I found it at work in my basement.

The lesson is that you should stash a sixer or two in the basement every six months or so. Dark, strong beers age the best, and bottle-conditioned beers even more so. The flavors the beers produce after nine years is unlike anything you can find in a commercial product. It requires patience and a reasonably cool place (reliably under 65 degrees, the less fluctuation the better). It doesn't cost a lot of money and the payoff is amazing. Plus, as you soon realize, the years roll by faster than you expect. You start digging around and pretty soon you find 10-year-old beer in the basement. And then all you have to do is muster the courage to crack it open and see what alchemy it contains.