The Naked Pint (40 page)

Beyond the beer and the glasses, there are a few beer tools that will make your home happy and fulfill your desire for cool beer gear. The only absolute necessity in the list is the bottle opener, for obvious reasons, but the rest will enhance your beer drinking at home and impress your guests.

W
hen you are truly ready to commit to beer, it’s time to move a few things around and make space for your beer cellar. We recommend a small beer/wine fridge. Now this isn’t the same thing as those crappy little fridges that people throw out; we mean a good-looking one with a glass front that allows you to get nice and specific about the temperature. They can run anywhere from $300 to $2,000, depending on your pocket and preference. Beers should be aged between 50°F and 60°F. It’s hard to keep this consistency without a dedicated fridge. Maybe if you live in a cool climate with an actual cellar, you could forgo the refrigerator; just make sure the beer doesn’t get too warm or cold. If the temperature changes too dramatically, the living yeast that is still working in certain beers may die, hampering any hope of additional bottle conditioning and perhaps even creating off-flavors. Keeping the beer out of sunlight is important as well. Sunlight can kill a beer as it does wine, especially if it interacts with the hops, which can cause off-flavors in the brew.

When starting your cellar, think about what you want to accomplish. Do you want beers that would fetch a high price from other beer lovers? Are you focused on the dollar value of your beer cellar? Or do you want to age beers that are your favorites, just to compare with newer vintages? Or perhaps you just want to experiment with aging, just to see how it treats a variety of beers. And how long are you willing to wait? Are you willing to wait a year or two? Or are you looking to drink your stock in the next month?

If you want to focus on monetary value, research the highest-rated beers on beer websites and look up the beers being auctioned on eBay. Find varieties in craft beer bars and stores that fetch the highest price. Check out our list of Beers to Drink Before You Die (page 132). For a more personal take, pick the big beers that you love the most and lay a few down. It’s great to see how your favorite Gueuze or Porter can change. Tasting the older vintage against the new is a great beer party pastime. If you want to experiment, be aware that some of your aging may not turn out so well. Some beers are not perfectly suited to aging, just as some wines don’t age as well as one hopes. There’s a risk in aging beer. First of all, know that lighter beers don’t tend to handle oxidation well; they can end up tasting off, creating some wet-cardboard flavors. And some lighter beers can’t handle the funkier flavors that may come from aging. Note that pasteurized and filtered beers do not benefit from aging. They have had everything living killed, and so no change will happen, except that the beer will most likely go bad.

It’s best to cellar higher-alcohol beers that are not filtered or pasteurized. Beers that age well tend to be over 7.5% alcohol. Alcohol is, after all, a preservative and keeps the beer from spoiling. Beers that have both huge flavors and complex flavors tend to age well. Highly hopped beers can benefit from aging because the hops also act as preservatives, and their bitterness is allowed to mellow out over time. This reduced bitterness means some of the other fruit, spice, and nutty malt flavors can come through. Sour beers like Lambic and Gueuze can get a lot funkier and lose some of the harsh tartness of the style. Belgian brewers of these styles have practiced aging them for years. Here are a few styles that generally benefit from aging: