When is Your Beer Ready?

I've read a lot of posts on here about people saying their brews have an "off" taste...sweet, sour, metallic, or when something just isn't right. Time after time, most of the advice I have seen says to just let it sit and mellow out. Time can cure most bad brews. Likewise, with a little time, a good brew will go through certain stages until it reaches it's prime stage, or when it tastes best. My question; how do you keep a beer at it's prime stage? I would imagine if you wait too long, the beer won't be any good, afterall, this isn't wine. How do the commercial brewers keep a beer at it's prime? If I pick up a Sam Adams Boston Lager, it tastes exactly the same...each and every bottle. How do you get consistently good brew in it's prime?

I'm still new but taking extensive notes and following the same steps would result with a close outcome. If you brew a batch and don't have good notes you're going to have a hell of a tough time figuring out what you did. There are a million variables in brewing beer that could lend to different flavors from the same recipe. The reason commercial breweries have the same flavor is because they control everything...water, temp, ingredients. As a homebrewer you can control all of these as well with proper equipment and vigilant monitoring.

This all comes down to note taking though, if you have everything recorded that you did, then you'll be able to recreate it.

1. Cold Storage
2. Microbiological stability
3. Chill-proofing

Commercial breweries will filter, fine, and/or pasteurize to improve #2 and #3. Most of them have little control over #1 once the beer leaves their possession.

Then there is the option nobody really does (not sure why, wine makers do it all the time).

4. Adding antioxidants, eg potassium metabisulfite.

About 3 days before it's all gone.

You can't "keep" a beer at its prime. It will continue to age and mature and it DOES get better with time just like wine. Depending on the alcohol content some beers are matured for years before they are even drank (ex. barleywine). A good brew will be good after it has had time to condition and continue to change over the next few years. The "prime" of your beer is pretty much subjective to the drinker. Eventually they will go bad but it takes a lot longer than you would expect. Commercial brews use the exact same process and ingredients every time and that is how their beers always have the same flavor. You also tend to consume these beers within a specific time frame after it is brewed so the flavors have already matured and haven't yet started to mellow.

Think of homebrew like wine - it's a living being and it never tastes the same unless you filter all the yeast out and even then it is aging.

The question is - why try. Even commercial beer will change flavors but they brew in such large quantities and mix batch's that what you are tasting is a mix of probably 4 or 5 different fermentation's. Plus as remilard said - it's all filtered and so forth.

Goose Island is promoting cellar notes including "develops in the bottles for up to 5 years" on their beers now.

As beginner homebrewers, we can't filter and maintain a beer for quite that long on a consistent basis but you can get a lot of time out of them.

Just enjoy your batches. Don't try to gulp down all 50 bottles in a month because you're afraid they're going to go bad. Drink them at a moderate pace allowing the beer time to mature and enjoy every bottle along the journey by taking notes of the subtle aging qualities. Make a note of when you think the beer tasted the best so next time you brew the recipe you know how long to let it age for. When the batch is gone - the batch is gone. You have more beer to brew!

Longer fermentation periods will help out the growth of the beer a lot. Try leaving the beer in a fermenter for two months or so and then bottle it. It will taste better than leaving it in the fermenter for a week and a half and then bottling it.