what was your oldest beer?

I was cleaning my basement ,errr my brewery the other day and discovered a hidden 6 pack of honey wheat ? Honey wheat whats that from. I havent made a HW in ummm almost two years? Could it still be good? No way, but i cant just throw it away. I know like any good homebrewer would do ill throw it in the fridge.I popped one the next knight and it nearly foamed over,but whatta ya know it tasted really good.I expected it to be yeasty after all it was bottle conditioned for 2 years. So my question is what was the oldest homebrew anyone else has had aside from barleywine??? I still cant belive it almost two years and it was good!!

I have a bottle down stairs that is about 15 years old.

Does mead count? Because I have some mead that is about a dozen years old. Not much left, just a couple bottles, but.........

I have a bottle of stout that's nearly 9 years old. I brewed it the weekend after my son was born. Gonna make him drink it at 21

lol, 11 years to go?

I had a friends 26 yr old beer. Pure malt my friend. Nothing left but malt. Like syrup

Grimtas said:

I have a bottle of stout that's nearly 9 years old. I brewed it the weekend after my son was born. Gonna make him drink it at 21

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Dig it! I have wine that I would do the same. Time to start designing that beer for him/her too!

I've got a keg of barley wine made in Jan 2005. Just tapped it, as it took 6 years to finish the 2003.

Grimtas said:

I have a bottle of stout that's nearly 9 years old. I brewed it the weekend after my son was born. Gonna make him drink it at 21

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That is an awesome idea. I'll have to remember that when I have a child.

EO74 said:

I was cleaning my basement ,errr my brewery the other day and discovered a hidden 6 pack of honey wheat ? Honey wheat whats that from. I havent made a HW in ummm almost two years? Could it still be good? No way, but i cant just throw it away. I know like any good homebrewer would do ill throw it in the fridge.I popped one the next knight and it nearly foamed over,but whatta ya know it tasted really good.I expected it to be yeasty after all it was bottle conditioned for 2 years...

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This almost exact thing happened to me last month. I found an extra pale ale among my dusty bottles and I haven't made an EPA in over 7 years! Threw it in the fridge and it was actually pretty good despite being so light. It was a hot day too so....

When I moved into my house, it became clear that a pretty serious brewer used to live there.

There's several hopvines that are very strong and seem to be old. I've made beer with the hops two seasons now and the beer turned out great, although I have no idea what variety they are.

In the crawlspace under the house, I found 3 cases of 22 oz bottles of homebrew. I refrigerated a bottle and tried it... terrible. I think it was probably the condition of storage rather than anything wrong with the beer. Some of the bottles shattered in my hand, as if the glass had become extraordinarily weak. Judging from the looks of everything, I think those bottles were at least 5 years old and the caps had not held their seal.

Personally, I've had some of my barleywine that was about 3 years old. We found it at a friend's house long after the rest of the batch was gone. Made me wish I had let the entire five gallons age that long.

I still have a 16-year-old bottle bottle from my first batch. There's no way it's any good, though. It's been sitting in a Corona bottle, at room temperature, in the light, for pretty much all that time.

I still have a couple bottles of a Baltic Porter I brewed about 5 1/2 years ago. They've been kept properly, so I wonder how they are. I might have to find out.

Other than that, I'm well into the last gallon of a two-year-old rauchdoppelbock. It's help up well, but it is time to finish that one off.


TL

I have a few bottles of a 1994 Oktoberfest that I brewed. I wouldn't drink them though.

I have 20 bottles of Sam Adams 1995 Triple Bock. My neighbors ensure my homebrew never lasts more than 6 months.

On the 4th of July around 1999 I was a friend's family party when the beer ran out rather late in the evening. My friend's father asked if we wanted another beer and shared a knowing glance with my friend. My friend came up from the basement with a couple of strange looking Budweiser cans. We learned that a case of beer had moved into that house with them in 1976. That beer had been sitting in the basement for 24 years.

I had one poured over ice. Another friend, who wasn't even born in 1976, did the same.

There's a reason Budweiser wants you to drink them fresh.

This spring, a friend of mine had decided to start brewing. I told him the first thing he needed to do was gather bottles. Come to find out, a guy he works with used to brew back in the day and gave him 3 cases of bottles, WITH BEER INSIDE.

The notes he put into the cases said that they were brewed in 94, which made them 15 years old. Yes, we drank all 3 cases (not all at once) and they were great.

i hear the mead guys wax the bottles... but maybe that is corks. who knows if it would help a crown. id give it an extra crimp if it were to last more than a year. but it seems you need at least 6%abv to weather the storms of time. on a brew day last year, my mentor broke out an imperial stout he bottles 10 years before. it was awesome.

I just tried a 6 month old hefe from a keg that I set aside. Extreme sourness. A very off sourness. Aceto? Maybe. But this will be the first beer I've ever dumped. Only a gallon left so no big deal.

The first stout I ever did tasted so roasty it was undrinkable. This was in '90. In '98 I found the two cases of it that had just two bottles missing. Best stout I ever had. I've got a Belgian Dark that has been in the bottle for over a year now and it is still pretty much soy sauce mixed with paint thinner. Hopefully this follows the path of the stout.

EDIT: I dumped the glass of hefe after a few sips and got myself an Oktoberfest. My tastebuds have been stained to the point where even the fest beer tastes off.

Oldest commercial I've had was a SN bigfoot that was 7 or 8 years old and properly aged.

For my own beers, they don't usually survive too long, and I haven't even been brewing for two years yet. I do have a couple of bottles that are right around the 1 year mark. This last weekend I was cleaning the closet in my office and found a single bottle from a batch of brown ale that's over a year old, I'm going to chuck that in the fridge and try it this weekend.

The porter and the stout that I sent in to the HBT comp were both brewed in feb, so by the time they were judged they were about 7 months old.

well, i just started brewing back in feb of 09, so the oldest homebrew i've drank is 6-ish months. But on the 1- year anniversary of my first batch i plan on breaking into all grain and doing some sort of belgian that i can just pack away for each yearly brew.

I'm exctied about getting some stuff set aside to age long term.

Great responces,it was just that I thought only strong beers were supposed to age and not get yeasty.I did an ipa that made my toes curl but it mellowed in about 5 months.