Golden Anniversary

Not really that long ago one of my favorite beers was Golden Anniversary Beer. Golden Anni is a cheap fizzy yellow beer. It is listed on Rate Beer as a blonde ale with a rating of 1 out of 100. You could get it at the beer store in New Brunswick for $2.65 for a sixer. The price was a big part of the allure. Also the initials are GAB, which led to the obvious word play Gift of GAB. As in, you look like you could use one more, here is the gift of GAB. One of the greatest days of my life as a touring musician was when we discovered 40's of GAB at a grocery store in Rochester. My how things have changed.

To mark the one year anniversary of this blog I busted out a beer that I had been saving for over 2 years. I am referring to Stone's 12th anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout. When this beer first came out, I bought six of them. Like all Stone anniversary releases, it came in a 22oz bomber. The last time I had one was at least a year and half ago. I remember it being quite good back then, so I was psyched to dig into this one. The first thing I noticed when I poured it was the lack of head and carbonation in general. It required quite a vigorous pour in order to get any kind of fizz. Color wise, it was consistent with what you would expect from an oatmeal stout. Aroma was that of sweet chocolate with some bitter roast aromas as a counter. It smelled good, but I was weary due to the lack of carbonation. I dove in despite my reservations. Like I expected, it was definitely lacking in the CO2 department. Looking past this, it was still a pretty tasty beer. Lots of chocolate and coffee flavors with a bitter backbone to counter the sweet from the massive malt bill. This beer definitely smoothed out over the last two plus years. No heat whatsoever despite the nine plus percent alcohol.

The other thing that surprised me about this beer beyond the carbonation is that it seemed to loose some body during the aging the process. When I first tried it in '08 it was full bodied, thick like a beer shake. Now, while still more full bodied then an amber or pale, it really didn't coat my palate like I thought it would. Later on I checked the cap and I could clearly see that the oxygen seal had shrivelled up. This leads me back to the subject of cellaring. I store my beer in a cabinet at room temp. My apartment generally stays between 65 and 70 degrees. These are not great conditions for storing beer. Ideally you would like to store beer at around 52 degrees with a high degree of relative humidity. These conditions are not acheivable when you live in an apartment complex. My only other option right now besides my beer cabinet would be the fridge. That isn't really a good option though for two reasons. First, I need to store food and fresh beer in there. And number two, refrigerators are designed to keep their contents dry. This causes the oxygen barrier on crowns of beer stored for long intervals to be compromised. The beer is thus exposed to oxygen which fucks beer all up. So right now it looks like I'm damned either way. The best solution would be to either buy one of those wine cellar things or design some sort of beer storage system. A project for another day. Right now I need to take it down. I have regional dudes coming into the grocery store tomorrow and I need to get some rest because I gotta be up by 4:00 am tomorrow. Thanks for reading over the last year or however long you have been paying attention to my half drunk rants on beer. Stay tuned for some more good anniversary stuff. Cheers.