To age or not to age? 15 regional beers worth the wait

Cold weather brings about beautiful changes this time of year – not just for leaves but for beers, too.

Seasonally-produced beers can be great to stash away for a year or more. Perhaps you (er, maybe your parents) have done it with wine.

You should definitely do it with beer, and you’re lucky – the Charlotte region’s breweries have the perfect candidates. This time next year, you can be enjoying a nice cellared beer in a November devoid of election messaging. The right beer and time can together make November great again.

“I thought you were supposed to drink beer fresh,” you might be thinking. Yes, enjoy beer fresh. But some beer is good, different and even better after a year.

Many of the best candidates – stouts, winter ales, barleywines – are now hitting shelves.

Similar to the process that leads to changing color pigments in leaves, cold aging puts beer through a chemical process where some flavors change and others fade, thereby allowing others to emerge. Generally, harsh booziness dissipates, and the beer as a whole just mellows and balances, like flavors that have spent all day melding in a crockpot or smoker.

Brawley’s Beverage, The Cellar at Duckworth’s and other bottle shops are experienced in cellaring and give great advice when picking out a beer to cellar. This time of year, you’re also likely to see they have cellared entire kegs to put on tap.

Breweries are increasingly bottling their products, so this list will grow, but here are the best cellaring candidates from and available in the region.

Stouts

– Event Horizon, Olde Hickory Brewery. (If you can only do one, do this one.)

– Up All Night, Triple C Brewing. (Available in regular and barrel-aged versions.)

– Silent Night, Mother Earth Brewing.

Winter ales

– Cold Mountain, Highland Brewing. (Available in regular and imperial versions.)

– White Blaze, Triple C Brewing.

– Christmas Ale, Olde Hickory Brewery. (Great Lakes and Anchor aren’t local, but they are readily available.)

Other styles

– St. Tuber Bourbon Barrel-Aged Abbey Dubbel Ale, Birdsong Brewing.

– Belgians, like those from Sugar Creek Brewing, also age well and are available more year round.

– Irish Walker Barleywine or almost anything else barrel-aged from Olde Hickory. (I would argue they have the best barrel aging program in the Southeast.)

– Eyes of the World Bourbon Barrel-Aged Smoked Porter, Triple C.

– Bigfoot, Sierra Nevada. (Available in regular and barrel-aged versions.)

Special releases

These are a few beers – known as “whales” because they’re hard to find – where you will need to wait in line, attend an event or find a friend who can get them, but they are well worth it. NoDa’s Monstro release has already happened, but maybe you know someone.

– Monstro Barrel-Aged Stout, NoDa Brewing.

– Fat Boy Barrel-Aged Baltic Porter, The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery.

– Cataclysm Barrel-Aged Stout, Heist Brewery. (Or most any other stout from there, like With Love From Russia Stout.)

– Sexual Chocolate Stout, Foothills Brewing. (Separate releases for regular and barrel-aged versions.)

Want to start cellaring? Here are some tips.

– Keep the beer cool (roughly 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and away from light.

– Buy at least two bottles each year. Age one bottle for a year. For the other bottle, especially if you already had it fresh on tap at the brewery, it’s interesting to try at the six-month mark. Or, if you know it ages well, save it for 18 or 24 months.

– Mark that it is to be saved. Consider a separate cooler, which allows better temperature control, too. Otherwise, your fridge (often colder than you want anyway) can quickly start to look like a bottle shop. And “accidents” happen. A significant other will let you know when it has gone too far.

– Much of the taste of beer is enjoyed through the sense of smell. Don’t pop anything good if you’re stuffy. And don’t serve a beer too cold. Let a beer warm up a bit, and you’ll notice a difference.

– Sours (a more year-round style) are another good candidate for aging.

– There are limits to aging. Especially when conditions are not ideal, a beer can develop a flavor often described as ‘cardboard.’ This happens more readily with winter ales because they don’t have the high alcohol content or other characteristics that help ‘preserve’ a beer throughout aging.

– When doing a vertical tasting, go in order from newest to oldest.

This story was originally published November 15, 2016 at 8:02 PM with the headline "To age or not to age? 15 regional beers worth the wait."