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TheLoneliestMonk

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i am having a small production triple ipa called lions & tigers. it was bottled by some geniuses in brooklyn. if you can get a hold of a bottle i really suggest it.

it has a pleasing grapefruit nose, a slight bitterness and a nice sweetness. it is almost cleansing on the tongue. despite the 10.5% alcohol there is not a hint of booziness.

i would be intrigued to find out how well this beer would age.

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I could be wrong, but I always thought hoppier beers usually don't age particularly well whereas maltier, weightier beers (like porters and stouts) often improve with age.

Please, someone step in and educate me! I could be putting bad info out on teh interwebz. :eek:

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Corona- another 100 degree day. :stillsick:

It was 100 degrees here too.

I'm actually drinking an ice cold Gatorade.

The only beer in my fridge is this awful Japanese beer I bought on sale. I've been slowly getting my mom to drink them so I don't have too.

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Margaritas with Don Julio Anejo and Grand Marnier. If you live in a place as hot as I do, it helps to be able to get a drink to go, which I can and do.

Edited for sloppiness and a sign I need to go to bed

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Beer doesn't age, does it? I thought beer had a very short shelf life?

Beer most certainly does age, and some varieties do not taste good until they've had a couple of years in the bottle. MC is correct in that historically IPAs were hopped to hell as a preservation method (most beers were). That said, most modern, and especially West Coast IPAs, should be consumed quickly. That's because the hop aroma (due to late-addition hops and dry-hopping) degrades quickly. The hop bitterness does not, though. So, an older IPA ends up with a lot of hop bitterness (a taste), but nearly no hop aroma (a smell), and that's generally not what the brewer was going for when s/he designed the beer. In fact, bottles of Pliny the Elder, arguably the first, and most certainly the best, DIPA say "DO NOT STORE. DRINK FRESH" because the brewmaster designed that beer to have a strong hop aroma presence. He won't even distribute outside the West Coast (Philly is the only exception to this) because he knows the essential qualities of his IPAs will suffer if left in the bottle/keg too long.

Beer styles that can or should be aged: barleywines, old ales, Russian imperial stouts, sour and wild ales, anything shoved into an oak barrel, some triple IPAs (e.g. the beer that kicked off this whole discussion), etc. Beers that keep are almost always above 8% ABV. Beers above 10% ABV generally need aging to take the edge off.

(remember, most "flavor" is some combination of taste and smell -- mostly smell -- and if one destroys the smell of the beer, one has destroyed what the flavor was intended to be. Mouthfeel also contributes, but that's a discussion for another day. :) )

ETA: Mr. X and I went to a vertical tasting of some old ales in 2010 or 2011. We had bottles of the same beer from mid-2000s, 1996, and 1992. The 1996 was the best -- it was more like a sherry than a beer. The 1992 was just on the cusp of being too old -- just a touch too much oxidation. The mid-2000s beer was OK, but was missing some of the lovely complexity of the beers from the 1990s.

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i would be intrigued to find out how well this beer would age.

I would be curious to know this as well. ;)

I suspect that it would lose the grapefruit nose (this being due to hop aroma), but that the strong malt backbone would oxidize well and stand up to the hop bitterness. At that point, you'd want to drink it at slightly below RT to let the caramelized malt smells and mouthfeel come through.

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