I'm scared...

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I'd chill one, open it, pour it, look at it, smell it, then taste it. If it's good, add drink to the end and repeat. :D

I cellar and age a little bit. Some beer gets much better with age (some doesn't, even gets worse). A couple years ago, I had a 2010 Brooklyn Black Ops (RIS done with champagne yeast) that I had fresh. To me, it was so awful that I almost dumped it. I opened another 2010 bottle of Black Ops 1 year later and it was amazing. I have a complete 2-deep vertical of Avery Mephistopheles (RIS at ~15+% abv) going back to Batch #1 that was bottled in Jan of 2006. :tank: I had an extra Batch #3 from 2008 I think, and it was awesome.
 
Gotta know. Weekend? Major cliffhanger. Id be popping one in the freezer. Better yet, stirring with an ice bath.
 
I have to throw in my experience here, only because I was in a similar boat.
Last October (2011). I was approached by my neighbor and he said " you drink beer right..? " Do I ever! I said.
He proceeded to tell me about how somebody at work gave him these, but he doesn't drink blah blah... I was just more interested in the beer. He handed me a file box full of bottles. close to 24.
I browsed through them to find Bud Light, Bud, Corona, and a few other BMC type beers. And wait whats this I find, Its an Anchor Steam! I thought that this could be promising. later that night looking through the bottles It hit me.... I haven't seen labels like this since I was binge drinking the summer I graduated high school!.... It brought back memories, some I tried to forget. I found the date on most of the bottles to be 2000 or 2001. The Bud and BL had weird white things floating in them. After opening it the beer smelled like bad vinegar. I was hoping thew Anchor Steam would be drinkable, but it too had sadly gone bad.

That's enough of my story, Open those darn bottles already!

Good Luck!
 
The biggest unknown and concern if it were me is what condition was their relationship in when he brewed the beer? If the relationship was on the rocks he may have brewed up a cyanide stout or a hemlock hefe. Either way, its your duty to take one for the team and report back
 
I just got them in the fridge. Based on the look, it's something quite opaque. So I'm hoping we're talking amazing aged imperial stout here...

One thing I did notice was relatively inconsistent fill levels. While not truly important, what might potentially be a lack in attention to detail is not comforting...
 
Someone should print up some tee shirts that say something like " I read the entire 5 pages of this thread and all I got was blueballs." I'd also buy one that said "I was on homebrewtalk.com when bwarbiany drank the hemlock hefe." Well done dgez.
 
Revvy said:
What the hell is there to be scared of? Nothing pathogenic can exist in beer. So you can't get sick. Why do people get amped up about this? It's not a big deal....

How many times do we have to say this. Why are people freaking afraid of this????

Beer doesn't go "bad" unless your sanitization is weak. Since nothing PATHOGENIC can exist in beer/wine/cider/mead, there should never be a reason to ever fear tasting something like this, no matter how old it is. Yeah, it may taste like crap, it may be vinegar, but NOTHING that could happen, could ever cause harm to anyone.

It's not worth passing by on something that could be amazing, because of fear.....

Noone thinks twice about drinking old wine do they?????

Beer is really no different than wine, homebrew or otherwise. Properly stored it can last and be drinkable for 100s of years.

To put it in perspective, in the Dec 07 Zymurgy Charlie Papazian reviewed bottles of homebrew going back to the first AHC competition that he had stored, and none of them went bad, some had not held up but most of them he felt were awesome...We're talking over 20 years worth of beers.

This is a great thread about one of our guys tasting 4-5 years of his stored brew.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/revisiting-my-classics-160672/

And I brewed an og 1.150, 150 IBU barleywine that I won't be opening for 5 years.

Not to mention the fact that there are vertical tasting for certain beers like Stone epic, where people collect each years beer and then sample a flight of them going back in time.

I just had this expericence not too long ago... We tried 48 year old beer today. One was interesting and drinkable, and one was gnarly.

Mbowenze has a thread about tasting an over 100 year old beer recently. And In my history thread there's a video of the OZ and James Drink to Britain tv series where they taste a beer older than that.....one that goes back to Napoleanic times iirc.
Click to expand...

Thanks Nostradamus!!!
 
bwarbiany said:
Hey, folks, I do have a job... I can't just start cracking these open at 9 AM to satisfy your curiosity!

I'll pop these in the fridge this evening, and I'll probably get around to tasting some by the weekend. I do plan to update the thread as I go since everyone seems quite interested...
Click to expand...

So what's the status? Are they any good? It is the weekend you know...
 
It is the weekend... I just got home from the in-laws, so dammit, it is time for a beer. Or for whatever this is, anyway.

So I cracked one open. First impression -- not a gusher, not flat. It did hiss when I popped the cap. Very good sign.

Took a whiff. The smell was strong, I'll admit... But I'll get to that later. I assume you want to see the pour:

neighborbeer.jpg


Small off-white head, fades quickly. Minimal lacing. Color is opaque & black. Carbonation medium to high, despite small head.

So, back to the smell. The smell was strong. Alcohol strong. Hard liquor strong. You know when I said I hoped it would be some sort of bourbon-barrel stout? I think that's exactly what this is. The smell was strong, but good. It was certainly not vinegar.

Taste/Mouthfeel: This was clearly a clean ferment. No harsh fusels, no sign of anything suggesting major off flavors or infection. Overall, I get bourbon and I get stout. And it's lacking any major alcohol heat, so it's either not overly strong or it hides it DAMN well. That's the positive. As for the negative, it's overly thin, lacking in a real malt backbone. I'd definitely say that if you were a homebrewer and told me you were giving me a bourbon stout, I'd expect more than what I got here.

The one thing I don't know is how strong this stuff is. Based on the thin flavor and the lack of heat, I'm guessing this isn't an imperial stout. I probably need to pull out the hydrometer and refractometer and plug the results into beersmith to figure out the OG.

Either way, I'm pleasantly surprised by bottle #1. This beer isn't great, but it's good. And I think I'm happy to know that I've got a bunch more bottles sitting in the fridge right now.
 
Thanks for the well written review! I'm glad they are drinkable. The inlaws will lead to drinking every time.
 
I drank a 30 year old bottle of Budweiser...it tasted more like a german lager than today's American ale...and surprisngly the carbonation was good...Oxidized a bit...but still drinkable. I would chill em up...get drunk for free :) If you don't like the beer then use it for making batters for deep fry. Zucchini blossoms and Pumpkin flowers were great.
 
bwarbiany...I have to ask...why are you drinking beer in a dirty glass? Bubbles should not be sticking to the glass. Do you have lots of calcium deposits in your water?
 
OldWorld said:
bwarbiany...I have to ask...why are you drinking beer in a dirty glass? Bubbles should not be sticking to the glass. Do you have lots of calcium deposits in your water?
Click to expand...
What makes you think it is bubbles? It looks like a frosted glass to me. Kind of equally retarded but not the same.
isurf said:
Was your kick stand out?
Click to expand...

Lol!! You don't have to drink Pfizerbier for that to happen
 
OldWorld said:
bwarbiany...I have to ask...why are you drinking beer in a dirty glass? Bubbles should not be sticking to the glass. Do you have lots of calcium deposits in your water?
Click to expand...

It's not dirty (nor, bottlebomber, did I do a "retarded" thing and frost it). Frankly I don't know why the bubbles were sticking to the side of the glass. That never happens when I use the same glass for pulls off my kegerator. I was surprised to see that as well.
 
That happens with root beer... Could this be root beer? You said you weren't getting much alcohol character ;)
 
bwarbiany said:
Not any moreso than any other morning!

You know, the sad thing about this thread is how anticlimactic the reveal became. I can't say that I wish it had been an utter mess of a beer, but it certainly would have been a lot more interesting for you guys!
Click to expand...

At least you got back to us on it. Did you follow the cheese beer thread? People were gonna kill that guy...
 
bwarbiany said:
It's not dirty (nor, bottlebomber, did I do a "retarded" thing and frost it). Frankly I don't know why the bubbles were sticking to the side of the glass. That never happens when I use the same glass for pulls off my kegerator. I was surprised to see that as well.
Click to expand...

I think your beers can do that when they are super cold,ive seen my stouts do it.
 
jonmohno said:
I think your beers can do that when they are super cold,ive seen my stouts do it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just got a spare fridge to use for lagering, and these were stored there. It could be quite cold in there -- I haven't put a thermometer in there yet to see how cold these really are, but it seems cold in that fridge...
 
JerseyJoe said:
What about the other bottles? How did they taste?
Click to expand...

Visibly, they all look to be the same thing, so I haven't gotten around to tasting the others. If there are any surprises, I'll let you all know, but at this point the anticlimactic thread I started will probably fade off into obscurity.

I guess my 15 minutes at HBT are up, huh?
 
You got way more than 15 min bwarbiany :D Its been an interesting read. It was almost a mystery novel for homebrewers: strange beers show up from nowhere, could they be poisoned, wheres the husband now, is it crap beer, bottle bombs, is he going to drink it? Crap like that never happens to me.
 
Let's just hope he is not a member on here and sees this thread.
 

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