For Marty Nachel, a decadeslong foray into beer cellaring had a bit of a haphazard start. While he had the intention of storing some beers in an effort to learn more about the effects of age on them, others simply became part of the collection after he forgot about them.
“There are several that were benign neglect,” he said with a laugh. “I did not put a lot of thought into: This one is in the fridge; this one’s in the cellar.”
Nachel, a beer judge and author of several-beer related books, said he has been gifted beers by a few people over the years for his cellar, which has “almost doubled” in size. But he amassed others by saving certain beers “for a rainy day” or something special over the years and simply never coming back to them.
“I’m really anal that way,” Nachel said. “I always feel a special beer deserves a special occasion.”
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No matter the intentions that built the collection, Nachel’s beer cellar has grown over the roughly 28 years he has been in his Orland Park home. During the pandemic, with bottle sharing opportunities on hold, he decided to see how a variety of old beers held up for a video series called “A Glass from the Past.”
“I thought: When am I going to drink all of these?” he said.
So he started popping caps and recording his reactions, recommending what varieties people should get to drinking right away and what might hold up for a while longer. There are no guarantees when it comes to aging beer. While some brewers track the zenith of aged beers and offer guidance based on that — Goose Island, for instance, indicates its Bourbon County Stout can be aged up to five years in the bottle — Nachel said most beer cellaring is a lengthy journey into the unknown.
“You can’t really know what it’s supposed to taste like 10 years down the road,” he said. “This is all experimental.”
That said, some common knowledge about beer can help guide what is worth cellaring and how. Nachel said beers higher in alcohol content — 10% or higher — “tend to be the better agers.” Refrigeration is all about preservation, but it also slows any possible changes in the bottle, which is why many chose to cellar instead. There is risk, though, in the form of bottles that explode if pressure builds over time for any reason. Light and oxidation are what will eventually cause a beer to go stale.
Nachel said one of his favorites in recent months was a 2014 Hill Farmstead Arthur, a saison he called an “exquisite beer” he had never tried before. He also said a 2016 New Glarus Cran-bic “held up very well.” But even when something from the cellar ends up being a bust, there is fun to be found in seeing how the tastes change, what holds up and what does not.
“That’s the risk you take, but it’s an education,” Nachel said. “Even when the beers aren’t at their best, I still enjoy the learning process.”
The collector
Mark McDermott lived in Park Forest until around 10 years ago when he moved to Downers Grove, at least in part because the new home he found has a great cellar space. And he needs the room. His beer collection has grown to 488 bottles from 78 brewers.
“It kind of got away from me, really,” he said.
It all started after his family moved to the Chicago area in the mid-1980s, right around the time that Goose Island opened its first brewpub. For its 1,000th batch of beer, Goose Island brewed a “strong stout,” its first Bourbon County offering. McDermott started picking up stronger beers from that point on.
For a while, he stored some in his refrigerator and others in boxes on a shelf that was made to hold LP records, with the collection really starting around 2002. Some of the beers, such as imperial IPAs, he cellars because they have a good chance of holding up well. Others are packed away for more sentimental reasons.
“Some of these have little stories attached to them,” he said. “There’s always a story.”
Among his prized bottles are 2002 and 2004 iterations of Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot. He also has a Sam Adams Triple Bock that dates all the way back to 1997, but he found it in 2010 at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Iowa. He also has a whole set of beer Lagunitas created in tribute to Frank Zappa. Some brews in the collection are, undoubtedly, past their prime, he said.
“Probably all of them are too long, really,” he said with a laugh. “I really should open them. I just keep saying I’ll get to them. … It’ll be an adventure.”
McDermott said that is the risk of cellaring beer. And enthusiasts cannot blame the brewers for the results.
“The brewer is not responsible for anything past the date on the bottle that says ‘best by,'” he said.
But McDermott has also had some great successes with cellaring. He recently opened a bottle of a 2003 Kasteel Belgian tripel from Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck he picked up in 2005 from Foremost Liquors in Oak Forest, which he said held up “surprisingly well.”
For McDermott, the beer cellaring may be as much about his collector tendencies as anything else. Over the years, he has collected stamps, comics and records. And in addition to writing a piece dubbed “The Beeronaut” for Chicago Now and chronicling his sampling on YouTube, he has created a spreadsheet for his beer collection and logged more 3,600 reviews on Ratebeer.com. He also keeps bottles or labels from some favorites.
“It’s a way of quantifying what I like to do,” he said.
Gateway beer
“I fell in love with craft beer in 2006, 2007,” Crest Hill’s Scott Pointon said.
That led to home brewing in 2008 and joining BOSS: Brewers of South Suburbia, through which Pointon learned more about cellaring.
“I dabbled in it over the years,” he said. “I started out trying to cellar everything. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s 10 styles, at best, that improve in the cellar.”
The first deciding factor is whether or not there is still yeast in the bottle. That is a big determinant of whether or not the beer will actually evolve over time. While those brews are still “mostly done” when they hit the market, Pointon said there is a chance that further fermentation occurs and the beer changes “very slowly.” But most of the biggest mass market beers are pasteurized, which means drinkers should not expect much other than the beer going stale with time.
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“The day they sell it to you is the best it’s ever going to be,” Pointon said.
His second question when debating cellaring a beer is whether it is hoppy or bitter.
“Hops fade with time,” Pointon said. “You lose what the beer was intended to be.”
Pointon notes a refrigerator basically puts a beer “to sleep,” so he opts for an unfinished corner of his basement for a collection that grew to 200-300 bottles at its high-water mark in 2019.
“It’s easy to forget what you’ve got in there and keep buying and buying,” Pointon said. “I don’t want it to get too out of control.”
So, in mid- to late 2019, he made a conscious effort “to drink down my cellar, so to speak.” He and his wife started pulling out bottles and sharing them. He, too, keeps the empty bottles of some favorites. The barleywines held up particularly well, he said, but Pointon also had some standout imperial stouts.
“Those are magnificent, too,” he said. “Strong beers age well, beers with yeast in the bottle.”
Pointon has also found some beer he enjoys more with a bit of age. Dogfish Head makes a barley wine, for instance, that he does not love when it is fresh.
“Around the three-year mark, it’s very, very good,” Pointon said. “And after the five-year mark, it’s wonderful. It’s perfection.”
Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.