Knittles & Beer

This month’s Session topic is a beer audit: what you have, and what it says about what you drink.  Our “cellar” is actually a wine fridge (that used to contain wine, honestly!) and our kegerator.  Usually, there’s a keg or two in our kegerator, but we’re out of CO2 and the bottles have taken over.

I’ve never done an audit exactly, just checked on a few bottles I was planning on sending to friends.  But I wasn’t surprised that my beer breaks neatly down into four categories:

1. Belgians

We brought more than a case of Westy and Cantillon back with us when we came back from our stay in the Netherlands.  Our stock has dwindled to a few bottles each of Westy 8, Westy Blonde, Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella, and Poperings Hommel Bier.

2. Locals

Of course, local beer is well-represented, with a few odd bottles from Tampa breweries like Barrel-Aged Big Sound from different years, a bottle of Pays du Soleil.  From our local brewery, Swamp Head, we’ve got a couple bottles of their first release of Saison du Swamp, somewhat more bottles of the second release, and a half dozen of their Batch 300 Tripel.

3. Homebrew

Of course, our hyper-local brewery (i.e., us) is well represented.  We currently have 20 bottles of barleywine, 35 bottles of cider/mead, 4 bottles of our first try at mead, 7 bottles and a gallon growler of our quad (the growler was filled from the tail end of our last keg after our we exhausted our CO2 tank), and 1 last bottle of our saison.

4. Stuff In The Fridge

And then there’s the stuff in the fridge.  It’s not really the cellar, but some of it sure does hang around a while.  Right now, there’s a selection of year-rounds and recent seasonals from Cigar City (Jai Alai, Maduro, Cubano Espresso, and Sugar Plum), plus an uninspired amber called Rollin Dirty they brewed for the Tampa Brew Bus, some Magic Hat Pistil, a few bottles of Michelob Amber Bock we picked up for our mother-in-law who doesn’t even like saison but brought some from down from Hill Farmstead for us anyway.  There are also a few singles: a Holy Mackerel Special Golden Ale, and two bottles that have slowly migrated to the back: a Shiner Octoberfest and a Magner’s Pear Cider that nobody wants to drink.

So, I think there are a few key takeaways from that list:

• To start with the obvious: the selection is pretty well driven by where we live and where we’ve traveled.  Not just in where the beer is from, but also in the dominance of Belgian-style beers.  Having lived right next to Belgium last year, and living in Florida where there is a strong selection of Belgian-style beers, really shaped what I drink and what I value.
• There are very few aged or even aging-worthy bottles.  We plan to age our barleywine for quite a while, obviously.  The barrel-aged Big Sound should keep, and I suspect the Grand Cru Bruocsella will last long enough for us to experiment with making our own lambic before we try making some kriek with it.  But the rest of the beers should really be drunk soon.
• Most of our keeping beer is in our wine fridge — which used to be full of wine.  We were really not big beer fans a few years ago, when we mostly drank French and Californian wine, and maybe the occasional Sam Adams with pizza.  Then I had my first sour beer — Lost Abbey Sinners 09 followed by Cigar City Sea Bass — what an introduction to sours!  Now there are only two bottles of wine in the house (a local dessert wine, and a Merlot we picked up this summer at a winery in New York).  So that’s a pretty big change.
• Drinking local: and one thing about the beer and the wine: we’ve gotten quite a bit of it directly from the brewery.  That’s true of the Westvleteren, Cantillon, Cigar City and Swamp Head beers, and both bottles of wine.