Ageing Beer! It definitely works!

[SrPrize]

I'm a new brewer, still doing K&K, some hop additions really not branching out to much atm,i like to research and really get an understanding of what i'm doing and why before i undertake a brew! But one thing i had heard of quite a lot but really didn't test out much in my total of 5 brew thus far is ageing the beer! Basically i'd brew it drink it repeat. Fortunately for me i must have mixed up some bottles from a second batch (Canadian blonde, with a hop addition, citrus peel and orange blossom honey) so i poured a beer tonight thinking it was another batch, but was in fact my second batch which had been ageing for four months and wow the difference is unbelievable. The flavors have all heightened eg. the honey has mellowed out, but still very prominent (not so much sweet just honey flavor), the citrus which was basically non existent before is now a nice back note. I suggest to anyone who is impatient like me, just forget about a bottle and see what you think a couple of months down the track and judge yourself! Anyone else got a similar experience?

 

[nathanvonbeerenstein]

depends on a variety of factors really! some styles i prefer to get into sooner like wheats when they are fresh, and other i like to let mellow for a while.
beers which are predominantly hope driven in flavour seem to lose a lot of their hop profile after a while and can become a bit bland imho.
in saying this, there are brews ive made that no matter how long i wait, still taste like cats piss and remain untouched in storage until their thrown.

 

[Bribie G]

Kits definitely benefit from ageing - I used to keep around 5 brews in advance, in my KnK days.

If and when you move to AG, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of styles actually benefit from being drunk young. For example American Pale Ales and UK Bitters are good to go once gassed and clear. They "evolved" that way from UK beers. In the 19th century the brewers used to keep massive stocks of "keeping beer" at the breweries, which cost a fortune in stock and plant. The around the turn of that century they started to buy up huge numbers of pubs and established their own "estates" of leased tied houses. So the newer milds and bitters (called "running beers") could be sent out in casks for the landlords to look after and bring to drinking condition over about 10 days, thus shifting the cost onto the landlords as opposed to the breweries.

American IPAs etc started off as US interpretation of British Ales as they had lost their own ales during Prohibition.

A good example of young beer is Guinness from Dublin that gets 40 hours in the fermenter, about 72 hours of "ageing", is filtered into kegs and sent off to the trade for immediate consumption. :chug:

 

[pat_00]

Interesting stuff Bribie, every stout I've made has needed at least a couple of weeks of ageing in the keg. 40hours in the fermenter, what type of yeast are they using?

 

[sp0rk]

Interesting stuff Bribie, every stout I've made has needed at least a couple of weeks of ageing in the keg. 40hours in the fermenter, what type of yeast are they using?

Turbo yeast!

 

[verysupple]

Kits definitely benefit from ageing - I used to keep around 5 brews in advance, in my KnK days.

Indeed, my KnK brews also improved with a decent amount of ageing. However I'm not entirely sure that's because they were KnK brews.

Although I haven't brewed a kit in a long time, I have done a couple of extract batches lately which I consider pretty much the same becuase kits are just hopped extract. These have been good to go basically as soon as they were carbed. So I think, at least in my case, that the reason the KnK brews too longer to come good is that my brewing practices were poor back then (particularly yeast handling and fermentation temps and times) and I was waiting for some of the flaws to age out. Now that I'm more knowledgeable and have better control of my processes the beers have fewer, or only minor, flaws and don't need long periods of ageing to fix them.

I think if a good experienced brewer got their hands on a fresh kit they could make a good beer without flaws that wouldn't need a long ageing period. Of course, as pointed out above, this is all style dependent. Some beers simply do need ageing.

 

[Bribie G]

Interesting stuff Bribie, every stout I've made has needed at least a couple of weeks of ageing in the keg. 40hours in the fermenter, what type of yeast are they using?

Close relation to Wyeast Irish Ale. I've done what they did and fermented a dry stout at 25 degrees and it was one of the brews that won me the trip to Beervana in NZ a few years ago.

 

[Blazar]

Bribie was that stout a kit or AG? Keen to put down a quick decent stout to age for next year.