A Five Year Beer Project Has Come to an End
Five years ago I bought Nils Oscars Julöl (Christmas Beer). They say that this particular beer will get better with time and recommend you to age it for five years before popping it open.
At the time, five years ago, I figured that it would be interesting to not only store a bottle for five years but also see what difference it actually does.
I took the one bottle I had, this was the year 2003, and put it in a dark cabinet at home.
The year after, 2004 that is, I bought a second bottle and put it next to the other one in the cabinet. I now had a one year old beer and one that was freshly made. I kept on doing this until this year. This should have given me a total of six bottles but unfortunately I missed 2005 so I only had five.
This year it was time to try them out and compare them to one another.
I realise that the comparison isn’t perfect. The recipe has been altered a bit over the years and the ingredients can give the beer a slightly different taste each year much the same like wine where the weather will affect the final product. Despite of the above it is essentially the same beer and the basic flavours of it shouldn’t change much from year to year.
Any way, time to drink some beer.
I tried them all at the same time so the alcohol wouldn’t change the last couple of beers so I took five glasses and poured each beer it it’s own glass.
The difference between them was very easy to distinguish: the older the sweeter. The youngest beer had distinct burnt flavour, as did the one from last year but it wasn’t as raw as the first. As I tried the older beers one by one they got sweeter and with the last one, the one from 2003, the sweetness had completely taken over the burnt flavour I felt in the youngest.
My favourite was the four year old from 2004. The sweetness dominated but there was still a hint of burnt caramel somewhere in it. Lovely.
At the end I brought out some nice dark chocolate to go with the beer and that really doubled the pleasure of drinking them.
What I’ll do from this year on is to always have a four year old in the cabinet that I’ll bring out on Christmas. It’ll take me three more years to get there since all I have right now is a bottle from 2007 but it’s well worth the wait.
