4 year old Killian's Irish Red

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thesweetlycool

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one of my friends had a few bottles of Killian's he found at the back of his closet when he moved. We popped them open to see how this incredible aging changed it. First off it smelled like a malty shake (you know that malt stuff you put in ice cream shakes) and tasted a little like this as well. It didn't seem to taste anything like killians and seemed to have much less gravity to it and less carbonation.

Is this usually what happens to extremely aged beers? Thought it was an interesting experience.
 
From what I understand commercial brews don't age after bottling like a homebrew would.

This is because most beer you find in the store has had as much of the yeast as possible filtered out before bottling. In other words the beer is as good as it's going to get once it's bottled and just goes downhill from there.

In homebrew and bottle conditioned beer (you can tell because there's a layer of yeast on the bottom of the bottle) the beer will actually age well and condition due to those yeast cells constantly working on the liquid.

I'm sure there's a break off point for bottle conditioning as well but I have not heard what that might be and it would depend drastically on yeast health, storage, and gravity.

Check out this video at around 4:05

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAScQrRiJsM&feature=related]YouTube - Oz and James Drink To Britain S01E05 - Part 1[/ame]

These two are allowed to sample a 139 year old "Royal Beer". In other words it was brewed specifically for the Royalty and must have been amazing at one point, however their reactions tell a different story.
 
It is not just about yeast. Sure, a lot of times a good bottle conditioned beer will hold up over one that has been filtered, but it also has to do with styles that should or should not be aged. A Killian's Irish Red is not a beer that will age well. Not enough going on in there (hops, gravity, etc) to really keep it up. I can't imagine this would have been any good.
 
To quote Michael Jackson: "If you see a beer, do it a favour, and drink it. Beer was not meant to age."
 
I would not say that i would classify it as "good" but interesting would definetely describe it. So far our homebrews have only bettered with age.
 
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