What's your oldest bottle?

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bracconiere

Jolly Alcoholic - In Remembrance 2023
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I see it says all things legal now....hmmm, so i distilled some water about 35% pure out of wine 10 years ago and have had it aging on valley oak. drink a glass every 4th of july to celebrate. very vanilla-y.

What's everyone's oldest bottle?
 
nobody ages their booze? i got another bottle of barley, aging on maple wood...4 years old now, drink a glass on my birthday every year....
 
I have some that made it 1 yr. it’s hard to keep any around longer than that. May have to get the wife to hide some like she hides the rest of my stuff when she is in ‘cleaning mode’.
 
it's easy for me to age the stuff, i like drinking beer! lol, i just like making booze to collect it...

DAMN 17 year old barley wine! that's longer than i've been an alcoholic! :mug:
 
I have a mead in the cupboard that was made completely wrong, so it's full of fusels and terrible to taste. I capped a bottle though and it's standing there - approaching a year now. I'll leave it there a couple of years and open it for funsies.

On the other brewing, I have a ~6 month old mead that's my oldest brew to date. 2 bottles left. After that there's a ~5 month old cider and that's about it. The rest are all spring chickens - and they don't last.
 
What is the minimum ageing time for, say, a decent tasting whiskey or rum? This would be aging distillate in 1g glass jugs with oak cubes, is this the way to go? Asking for a friend.
 
There's no definite answer. You can get varying results from varying batches. I would recommend you give this podcast a listen: http://gotmead.com/blog/gotmead-live/8-29-17-ryan-carlson-oaking-mead/

It's relating to mead, but the same principles will apply to whisky and rum, I would guess. You'll obviously just have to adjust for the stronger alcohol in whisky/rum, but that'll be up to you to discover.

My reason for saying that it depends per batch is because I've tasted some whiskies in my life (not a lot, I will admit), but I've tasted unaged ones (few months in oak) and also ones aged for many years, and sometimes even the young ones are not bad at all. Depends on what you like.
 
What is the minimum ageing time for, say, a decent tasting whiskey or rum? This would be aging distillate in 1g glass jugs with oak cubes, is this the way to go? Asking for a friend.

honestly, just a couple weeks and most of the flavor comes over from the wood...When i actually drank this stuff because i got cut off from malt for beer, that's about as long as i'd age it for...Now that i'm back on beer, i just collect bottles now. and as far as i know tell your friend that aging strength is 65%, and yes 1g or i like carlo rosi bottles...perfect size for a 5gal batch of ~16% starting...

(damn fancy keyboards with power keys next to the backspace, i was worried i'd have to retype this!)
 
here's a couple bottles i did back in mid july, light toast oak on the right, and the one on the left is aging on some pecan smoking chips i toasted myself in the oven. Both rum...

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and this is a whiskey on light oak, only aging since sunday....you can see it already has some color development....


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Is this also accepting non-distilled beverages?

I've got some stout that I keep forgetting I have that I need to drink. I've aged some kettle soured berliner weisse for more than a year by accident, and it tasted fantastic. I should make more some day...

I'm purposely aging some belgian dark strong ale. I made 3 gallons sometime around the '15-'16 New Years +/- a month. I made basically the same recipe last christmas that finally got bottled and I'll be saving a portion of that for a few years.

A buddy of mine and I made some barleywine 2-3 years ago that I'm squirreling away. I drank most of my portion after a few months and the bottles I have left are reserved for when we meet up sometime around his birthday, one per year until they're gone.
 
Is this also accepting non-distilled beverages?

I've got some stout that I keep forgetting I have that I need to drink. I've aged some kettle soured berliner weisse for more than a year by accident, and it tasted fantastic. I should make more some day...

I'm purposely aging some belgian dark strong ale. I made 3 gallons sometime around the '15-'16 New Years +/- a month. I made basically the same recipe last christmas that finally got bottled and I'll be saving a portion of that for a few years.

A buddy of mine and I made some barleywine 2-3 years ago that I'm squirreling away. I drank most of my portion after a few months and the bottles I have left are reserved for when we meet up sometime around his birthday, one per year until they're gone.

it seems like it? :mug:

I'd say if you got something over a year, your old enough to talk right?

this is the distilling topic though, but if it wasn't for trying to make beer last....we wouldn't have IPA!

And don't people like old wine too?
 
Not distilled, but...

...my RIS will hit its first birthday sometime early next month. At that point, I'll have more bottles of year old homebrew than I have that are younger. From a few 4L batches of crappy mead that I can't be arsed to drink but feel bad dumping (they're getting better with age, really! In three years, they've gone from 'bad' to just 'not good', so there's hope, right?) to my annual big beers (brewed in the late fall to drink primarily in the next winter, with some of the bottles hanging around for years after that), I've got about 120 bottles near or well beyond the one year mark. The oldest was four and a half years old when a random dude grabbed it out of the fridge when his buddies helped us move in April. The new champs are four or five bottles of wax sealed RIS brewed in November 2014.

If I were to distill, I'd probably age most of my stuff for years or decades. I'm a light drinker and a patient hobbyist, so it would just make sense that I'd be the guy to try to replicate an 18 year old scotch with my homebrew.
 
... a few 4L batches of crappy mead that I can't be arsed to drink but feel bad dumping (they're getting better with age, really! In three years, they've gone from 'bad' to just 'not good', so there's hope, right?) .

I feel your pain. I didn't want to mention it, but I have some cyser I made from wildflower and Simply brand apple juice and I can't drink it, it is just terrible. I can't throw it out either.

I'm kind of hoping that someday I'll go to some event where people are so inebriated that I can pass it off and nobody will notice.

Re-reading that last line, I realized I might be a horrible person.
 
theese last two bottle i ran were from a bad batch of beer....i always run beer i can't drink. because i don't want to abuse alcohol and dump it...so i usually add sugar kick up the yeast again, then get a gallon or two of 65% out of it....

As far as i know apple jack is a good drink?
 
If I had a still, I'd definitely run that mead. As it is, I'm just sampling a bottle once a year or so. It's not undrinkable, but not very good either.

In honor of this thread, I cracked a bottle of the wax-sealed RIS last night. It was pretty good young, but it's only gotten better with age. Two or three left. Tossed a barleywine near its third birthday in the fridge in its place.
 
I think I should get a still. We have nice stores in SA that sell legal still, registered with the authorities and everything for not as expensive as you might think. I'll just distill everything and anything I can't drink.
 
I have two magnums of blueberry pseudo lambic (WLP655) that I brewed 2 years ago. It tasted like poop initially, but 2 years on it's awesome. Saving these two magnums for a celebration when we have a vaccine or treatment that will let us get back to "normal" or whatever the new normal is going to be.

Beyond that, I've been saving one bottle of every batch that I've every brewed (just over 70 5 gallon batches at this point). I decided this month that it was stupid to keep the APAs, IPAs, and IIPAs so I cracked those open and they were surprisingly good especially considering the oldest was about 6 years. I expected much more hop degradation.
 
you know when you get excited about a post....about all ready to brag about your brandy, and toddler whiskey....you notice the "OP" over your avatar....go aww damn, well my brandy is two years older now, and so is my whiskey!! (i feel like an old timer now :D)


edit: damn this thread, just reminded me...i forgot to celebrate the 4th with a glass this year.....next year!
 
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