Am i crazy if...

I decide to make a pale ale around this time bottle it and let it age for 2 years (for my little bro's bday)? Would it suck being bottled for that long?

Thoughts.

FishinDave07 said:

I decide to make a pale ale around this time bottle it and let it age for 2 years (for my little bro's bday)? Would it suck being bottled for that long?

Thoughts.

Click to expand...

From what I understand, alot of beer won't be good for much longer than a year in the bottle, but there might be preservatives that could help its shelf life.

if you want to age beer that long, you want to make sure you can keep it at cellar temps, you want it to be a yeast strain that will do well with age and improve over time, and you want to take into account what flavours will increase or decrease over time.

belgian beers and heavier beers will do better with age. in fact for some of them, they are best after sitting in the bottle for a couple of years. i'd suggest posting a recipe and getting some feedback.

I had a customer of mine give me a taste of his 2 year old brew that was made from a canned kit. Tasted pretty fresh to me.
The yeast in our homebrew acts as a preservative, extending the shelf life of our brew. Higher alcohol would help also.
I'd say go for it.

A big belgian or a barleywine would be awesome. I've got a 1 year old belgian right now that is getting better everyday.

My experience with hoppy ales is they don't make it past a year without losing the nose. Maybe if you kept them near freezing your results would be better, but based on an off-taste seminar I took, I don't think it would help much. Towards the end we compared samples from the same brewer and batch, one sample was kept at cellar temperatures the other refrigerated. They both had problems, different problems, but neither was drinkable.

Do something big and malty.