Surprise homebrew!

So there I am, cleaning out my garage, going through boxes I had packed up from moving. I open up one of the boxes and what do I find? A bottle of home brew that I had absolutely no idea was there. I don't even know what's in it because it has no labeling at all. If I had to guess, though, I would say it's a double red from April. It's been sitting in the garage for probably two and a half months now with all the fluctuations in temperature we've been having. I'm going to crack it open here in a bit and hopefully it hasn't gone bad. But don't you just love those little surprises?

Cool! Let us know how it turns out. I'm too lazy to label bottles (I label the case itself), so if I remove bottles from a case (ie: to make room for another batch) I wind up with a few mystery beers. Every few months I gather them all up and chill them; its a fun night of "guess which beer"

Hope it's still good. I don't label either, but you can get small garage sale stickers from the dollar store. I put one on each bottlecap and one on the recipe so I know what's what. It beats removing labels.

Turns out it's an RIS from March, so it's been aging for about 4 months now. The flavors have really melded together nicely and the fluctuating temps didn't have any adverse effect on it. I'm so happy I found this because I have another one, but I wanted to see if I could age it for a year before I drank it. This way, because I didn't know what was in it, I can't be blamed for cheating.

Jesus how quickly did you drink the RIS if that is one of the last bottles and it's four months old?

For a beer like that I wouldn't touch it until it's four months old, if not more

cmybeer said:

Jesus how quickly did you drink the RIS if that is one of the last bottles and it's four months old?

For a beer like that I wouldn't touch it until it's four months old, if not more

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A couple things made it go so quickly:

1) It was three gallon batch
2) A lot of it was given away
3) Up until recently I haven't been the aging type, but now I'm starting a collection of beers I'm aging

Between the fact that brewing a beer worth aging is atypical of me and the fact that until recently I haven't really appreciated the value of aging, you can see where I went wrong, but I'm trying to fix myself now.