When Mike Miller eats mussels, he knows exactly what vintage to match with the shellfish.
And it’s not a wine.
It’s two-year-old Orval, a Trappist ale from Villers-devant-Orval in Belgium.
“I think that when you drink Orval, you want to have shellfish,” said Miller, owner of Delilah’s bar in Chicago. “Fresh, it’s fabulous. But at two years it becomes even more rounded.”
For most beers, fresh is better. But for many bigger, bolder beers, good things come to those who wait.
“A Budweiser is best drunk fresh, but don’t believe that is relevant for all beers,” said Miller, whose bar collection holds more than a thousand cellared bottles in a hundred-some brands and many vintages.
Just like wine, cellaring beers allows the taste to mellow, to coalesce, to evolve with flavors that don’t exist straight off the assembly line. Any yeast left in the bottle finishes its fermentation. The alcohol taste will fade into the background and the remaining flavors will round as the brew undergoes a gentle oxidation.
“The same idea applies to cabernet sauvignons,” said Randy Thiel, brewmaster for Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y. “When they are young they possess aggressive flavors, but with a few years of aging under their belt, they become much softer and gentle on the palate.”
“There are certain taste rewards to cellaring,” said Jerald O’Kennard, tasting director with The Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago. “You can improve [the beer] and get flavors you normally wouldn’t get.”
“They’re not going to become bigger, bolder, more boozy, more bright, those sort of aspects,” Miller said. “They’re going to round, and more subtle aspects are going to come out.” And the malt flavors will come forward, as the bitterness of the hops melts in the background.
Not all beers, especially mass-market beers, can be aged.
“If you take a can of PBR [Pabst Blue Ribbon] and put it in your cellar and leave it there for three years, it won’t taste better,” Miller said. “It’s not intended to. It’s meant to be drunk very cold and as quickly out of the brewery as possible.”
“The usual mindset of beer is it is a perishable food item,” Thiel said. “That’s true for American lagers. They don’t have the attributes that make beer evolve into something better.”
The biggest factor in determining if a beer stands up to aging is alcohol content, Miller said. “It has to be at least 5 percent alcohol content. Below that it won’t cellar well.”
The beer also should be fairly full-bodied, he added. Not dark, necessarily, but full-bodied.
Bottle-conditioned beers work well because the yeast isn’t filtered out of the bottle, allowing it to continue to work its chemical magic, O’Kennard said. Make sure it wasn’t pasteurized, which kills the yeast.
Ales tend to be better candidates for cellaring than lagers. But some lagers, such as dopplebocks and ice bocks, can stand the test of time.
“Traditionally, it’s the ales, the strong ales, the barley wines that work,” O’Kennard said. “Christmas beers are a good candidate.”
Belgian ales, especially anything darker than a golden ale, are excellent candidates.
“All the Trappist beers age well,” said O’Kennard, who cellars about 70 to 80 bottles, in 20 brands, at home. Lambics also are a good beer to put down, he said, because of their complexity.
Cellaring beer involves the same principles as storing wine. Keep it in the dark and under a constant temperature, preferably in the 50s to 60s, according to O’Kennard.
“You don’t want it flashed in the summer or frozen in the winter,” he said.
But unlike wine, humidity isn’t necessarily a factor, as long as it isn’t in the extreme.
“The good thing about cellaring beer is you don’t need any special shelving,” Miller said. “If you can keep it in a remotely temperate place, preferably out of sunlight, you can cellar for a really long time.”
Thiel recommends storing bottles standing up. “If a beer is stored on its side, it can pick up bad flavors from the closure,” he says. “If it is a metal cap, the seal integrity can be compromised and rust and metal flavors can get into the beer. If it is a cork, the beer can pick up musty flavors.”
Miller does recommend storing bottles on their side if they’re sold that way, to keep wet corks from drying out.
How long to cellar?
When aging beers, there is no set timetable on when they reach their peak flavor. Even with the same beer, the malts and hops adopt different flavors each vintage and over time, just as wine grapes do.
Delilah’s bar owner Mike Miller recommends that first-time cellarers find a beer they like and taste it to get a baseline for comparison. Then buy six bottles, and try them every year or so. When you find a certain age and flavor you like, voila.
“If at two years it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this is right on,’ go buy six more and age them two years.”
Also, make sure to check with your retailer to see how long they have had the beer. The Belgian ale you see on the shelf could have arrived six days or six months ago. When you bring them home for storing, mark each cap with the year you bought the beer.
Experimentation is key. And because a 750 milliliter bottle of beer usually is cheaper than wine, it is easier to try different types without spending thousands of dollars.
“Chimay Grand Reserve is $100 a case,” Miller said. “It is among the pinnacle of beers, and it is cellarable for up to 20 years. If you look at a cabernet in the same equation, that’s a $1,000 difference.”
Labels to try
If you are interested in aging beers, try out these breweries and individual beers, which should be available at larger liquor stores.
– Chimay, all styles of the Belgian stalwart.
– Capital Brewery’s blonde doppelbock, from Middleton, Wis.
– Any Fantome, a Belgian specialty brewer. With Fantome’s Winter 98 beer “what we found after five years is it keeps on getting better,” Miller said.
– J.W. Lee’s Harvest Ale, a strong English ale.
– Orval Trappist ale, from Belgium.
– Ommegang beers–such as Hennepin Farmhouse Ale, Rare Vos Amber Ale and Ommegang Abbey Ale–hold up well to aging. They recently started touting their Three Philosophers, a quadrupel mixed with Lindemans Kriek, a cherry lambic, with a label that encourages cellaring.
– Unibroue, a microbewery from Chambly, Quebec, especially the Trois Pistoles and the Fin du Monde.
–J.B.
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Tasting
A Vintage Beer Festival at Delilah’s will feature 50 cellared and aged beers from 40 breweries, including some breweries no longer in business. Local brewers will answer questions. $25. 1 p.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, 2771 N. Lincoln Ave. For information, 773-472-2771.
