It’s been 10 years since the publication of my book, Vintage Beer. It was good timing. The trend of cellaring beer was starting to boom, and the media—not just beer media—were intrigued by this “new” concept, helping to spread it far and wide.
Beer geeks were banging the drum, and the new generation of brewers were in on it, too—shifting their focus toward making cellar-worthy styles such as high-ABV stouts, barleywines, and just about anything and everything “sour.” The wider beer world was embracing the fact that a select group of beers could develop over time, and it responded by stashing away bottles in the cellar.
Fast forward to today, though, and beer cellars almost seem to be a thing of the past. A decade ago, a post about drinking a five-year-old Bourbon County would have stirred excitement; today, it mostly garners scorn. People who kept beer cellars might now express some bitterness over the practice, or else dismiss it entirely. Breweries, meanwhile, have generally moved away from encouraging it. Back then, many breweries were releasing beers young, when they could still use some time to come into their own; presumably, the brewers are wiser now.
But is it as simple as that?
[PAYWALL]
What’s Changed?
To dig into what caused this shift, we should first look back not just at beer in 2014, but also at beer culture. There were some beers that benefited from aging, but there was another, less-discussed reason for the beer-cellar boom: the collecting mania around the rarer end of the beer spectrum. Whalez, bro.
Anything lambic, barrel-aged, or fruited appeared to have a secondary market value, and the same phenomenon that fuels comic-book collectors and sneakerheads was alive and well in the beer world. Beer trading, which had been around for years but was focused on out-of-market beers, morphed into a cutthroat, auction-style battle for rare bottles. Truck chasing, brewery memberships, 4 a.m. lines for beer releases, and so on—if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you lived it, on one side of the bar or the other.
If you collect something for a hobby, it’s natural to showcase your collection—brag on it, treasure it. So, in beer collecting, the “new” concept of beer cellars temporarily overcame the somewhat inconvenient fact that beer is meant to be consumed and not hoarded. These rare beers were supposed to actually get better over time. Problem solved!
Cellaring Meets Reality
Except, as we know, that didn’t really solve it. The problem was that just because a beer is acidic or high in alcohol doesn’t mean that it will automatically improve with age. In fact, even when a beer meets one of these prereqs, the brewery is most likely releasing it at its best—with aging, there are so many things that must go right, and there are a hundred ways it can go wrong. It takes evaluation and testing to find out whether a beer has the potential to improve with age; there are no easy boxes to tick.
Cellarers were rarely that careful. A more likely scenario was that they had one ultra-rare bottle and wanted to cling to it. I literally wrote the book on this, and yet I sometimes fell victim to the same mindset. With a rare beer, it was too easy to just assume that it would improve and skip the eval.
The result, unfortunately, was that a lot of amazing beers slowly wasted away over a decade or more in people’s basements across the country—either because those beers never had any real potential to improve in the first place or because people held on to them way too long. Eventually, beer tastings started turning into cellar-cleaning parties, and a lot of long-treasured beer would go down the drain. How many of us would (perhaps inwardly) groan in recent years when someone would pull out a random, five-year-old imperial stout that had likely become a soy-sauce bomb?
I’d like to think that we’re all wiser for the experience, and that the mania stage of collecting beer has passed. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean the beer cellar is obsolete. We weren’t just aging beers for rarity. There was a basis: Many of these beers did get better over time. One of the biggest reasons was that in the early 2010s, breweries were releasing rocket-fuel barleywines and too-young mixed-culture beers that needed time to mellow and develop.
Back then, it was rare to be able to buy a beer that had the decadent flavors that can only come from years of aging. However, things have changed on that front, too.
The Role of Brewers
In 2024, brewers’ abilities and the market have turned in favor of producing ready-to-drink, vintage-style beers that negate much of the need to cellar at home. As brewers, you saw the same thing we did: Some cellared beers would excel, while many others came out thin, stale, and with little to offer beyond the aged flavors. And you were positioned to do something about it: Learn, experiment, and hone your product to showcase these vintage flavors before out-and-out staleness creeps in.
Bottle Logic, the Southern California brewery renowned for its barrel-aged offerings, has evolved their techniques over the past decade.
“We celebrated the 10th vintage of Darkstar November, our flagship rye-and-molasses bourbon barrel–aged stout, by pouring a 2014 to 2023, 10-year vertical for our team,” says Lindsay Langton, Bottle Logic’s creative director. “It was fascinating to taste our growth as we improved our techniques, machinery, and recipes, year by year. Tasting through 10 years was a fun way to reminisce with our team and mark progress within our production. Still, it wasn't something I wanted to offer our guests because the early vintages are showing a fair bit of oxidation and losing some sparkle, as we expected.”
Chicago’s Revolution, which also has won a following for its barrel-aged beers, has similarly developed techniques over the years to hone its products. Rather than simply aging beers before bottling and release, the team leverages blending to make ready-to-drink vintage beers.
For their lauded Deep Wood series, they intermingle older stock with fresher batches to ensure that the beer has plenty of young, “beery” flavors to go with time-derived aspects of the mature. Revolution now also varies the final gravity of various batches, knowing that the amount of residual sugars greatly affects how a beer ages over time and what flavors result. It’s a blend of art and science that, at this scale, was not in existence 10 years ago. With the spectrum of blends at their disposal, Revolution aims to release its Deep Wood series and other barrel-aged beers at their peak.
“We’ve taken the stance that we want people to drink our beers when they are released, not age them further,” says Marty Scott, Revolution’s barrel program manager. “We age the beer ourselves, so the customer doesn’t have to. And, to be honest, we’re seeing a lot fewer people saying they’re going to buy our barrel-aged beers to age or to build a vertical.”
At Bottle Logic, Langton shares similar sentiments: “If you’re aging with a particular scientific goal, there are valuable lessons and interesting discoveries to be made,” she says. “I just hope people acknowledge the effect of their choice when electing to experience the liquid outside of how the brewery designed it to be enjoyed.”
Changing Consumer Habits
While production techniques have improved, so has consumer’s willingness to pay a premium for the cost of on-site aging.
Giving up valuable square footage to store beer for a year or more wasn’t considered financially feasible in the ’00s, but breweries such as Firestone Walker, Jester King, and Perennial have shown that it can be done successfully on a large scale, thanks to the consumer’s willingness to pay.
Formats also have changed to meet the consumer’s pivot away from home cellaring. Instead of releasing vintage offerings in bottles, many breweries now release them in cans—unthinkable, a decade ago. Some even go so far as to package in mini-sized eight-ounce cans—bad for cellaring, but good for solo drinking.
Primitive Beer, the Denver-area blenders who specialize in spontaneously fermented beers, also have adapted their approach, says head blender Brandon Boldt.
“The major change we’ve made in response to the meandering habits of consumers is to additionally package our beers in smaller volume formats, like 375 ml bottles, for those interested in consuming ‘young’ rather than allowing further maturation of our bottles in the cellar,” Boldt says in an email. “It is relatively well known that smaller-format bottles have reduced resilience for deep aging as a function of the ratio of package oxygen ingress to beer volume. Perhaps most importantly, smaller bottle formats are easier to enjoy solo, rather than needing to play the waiting game for selecting the celebration and auspicious group share that many feel necessary in order to open larger-format bottles.”
Walking into a bottle shop today, one can find mixed-culture blends of various vintages as well as barleywines and stouts that display decadent aged character. The quality of these beers far exceeds that of their predecessors a decade ago. Meanwhile, the hoarding/rarity aspect has mostly subsided. Ten years ago, we couldn’t have imagined that you’d be able to walk into a store and pick up a Surly Darkness, Russian River Beatification, and multiple vintages of Drie Fonteinen.
Can the market sustain this approach? “We want our retailers to have a healthy amount of volume for our beers, especially the aged ones,” says Scott at Revolution. “We don't want them to die on the shelf. That means selling beers at the right price and quantity.”
Here’s to hoping this is the new normal.
Enjoying the Cool, Dark Niche
For most drinkers, the improved quality, multitude of on-shelf options, and muted call of the whalez have killed the beer cellar. However, there are still a few of us who aren’t quite ready to kick the habit.
The other day I opened a 10-year-old bottle of Hill Farmstead’s Arthur saison. Its delicate vinous character, still-bright citric acidity, and touch of barnyard funk that only time can create reminded me of why I started cellaring in the first place. There were—and still are—a very select group of beers that really do develop beautifully in the bottle over years or even decades. Not everyone enjoys them, but some of us do.
Just as some wine drinkers like sherry and port while others don’t, some beer drinkers enjoy aged characteristics more than others. These are probably the same folks who were aging beers even before the cellar craze came along.
Boldt at Primitive says he sees this niche continuing. “If you’re the type of person who enjoys and collects lambic and terroir-focused wild beers, you’ve already fallen deep down the rabbit hole,” he says. “Our club members and repeat customers often try a sample of our beer upon release, and may purchase a bottle for immediate consumption, but [they] tend to divert much of their shares to their cellars for continued aging.”
Even for those of us who continue to maintain cellars, given the changes of the past decade, they are probably much smaller than they used to be. Over the past 10 years, my cellar of about 250 bottles from 70 different producers is now at around 75 bottles from 15 producers. Roughly half of those are Belgian lambic beers, and the others are those that have proven to age well. To be honest, though, I’m more excited about my collection than ever—all are carefully curated and time-tested.
And while they may have moved out of the limelight, I believe beer cellars will live on—back in the cool, dark shadows from whence they came.
