How to avoid Oxidation for 15 years

Lo nearly fifteen years ago, I made a lovely brew for a lovely lady (who would one day agree to take me as her husband). The beer, a Crème Ale, was made in the finest homebrew fashion with ingredients from a now lost shop in western Sorrento Valley, San Diego. A typical homebrew batch, five gallons were aged in time for the 25^th anniversary of my fancy’s birth. Of the 48 twelve-oz bottles that I thereafter capped, a scant 12 would live in cardboard, closed from light, but likely not temperature, as they rode to the Bay Area, to Boulder (6000’), to Grand County (9000’), to Highlands Ranch, and then to Longmont. Six remained this past summer, and I discovered four in my garage last night.

As I opened the Izzi soda box, where I keep random single homebrews (don’t you too?), there seemed to be call from the aged Quarter Century Crème Ale. The label bore a date in 1998—last century, after all—so I was a anticipating some oxidation.

Oxidation in the homebrew setting is the creep of oxygen into a beer, and perhaps the most frequent and easily identified homebrew “off” flavor. The flavor is oft described as “cardboard”-like or wet paper. In minor amounts, it may come across as a barrel-esque quality. In larger volumes, it’s a pernicious staleness.

Oxygen will eek in to some degree no matter what the brewing process, even with commercial brewing. For homebrewers the most susceptible aspects of the process are transferring beer from primary to secondary, secondary fermentation in plastic, bottling, deformed bottle caps and over-pressurization/too lengthy pressurization of CO2 in kegs. The latter is also a common commercial beer oxidation weak point.

As Oxygen sneaks into beer, fatty acids and organic compounds introduced with the hops and steeping grains break down, leaving Trans-2-nonenal (3-Hexyl-2-propenal). Sometimes, this is what you want, e.g., in barley wine or imperial double Baltic porter. Most of the time, a homebrewer does not want these flavor.

So you have two choices if you homebrew:  be fastidious about closing in as much of your transfer system as possible, i.e. use hoses and siphons that do not introduce outside air; or drink your beer within a few weeks or months of its bottling. Some beers should be consumed fresher anyway, Imperial Pale Ales being one of note.

Back to my adventures in brewing; somehow my 15-yr old beer was not contaminated. Unfortunately, I do not recall what I did back then, though I did boil my bottle caps, which may have led to a tighter seal if they conformed to the specific shape of the bottle lips. Time has erased most of the other details though.

One caution I can recommend going forward, if you plan to brew a big beer, read “high gravity” or over 9% ABV, you’ll need to age it and the opportunity for oxidation is ripe. As such, try not to splash your beer before or during bottling, store all bottles cap-up (not on side), to the extent possible control temperatures to within the ale range (not to exceed 80 degrees F), and it does not hurt to add a little love. In my case, I was wooing my lady. I was sweeter back then, and maybe some of that youthful innocence found its way into the bottles.

As for the three still “cellaring”, I’ll savor them with the object of my affection sometime before they hit 20 years. I doubt I can evade oxidation that much longer, and besides, who makes homebrew to let it sit around for 20 years!