Beer Forum

couldn't find much in the search.

what's the typical time you are aging your beer before consuming? for example: you brew a porter, pitch etc, 1 week later fermentation is pretty much done. are you kegging after 1 week? 2 weeks? a month???

i'm asking because i've been brewing and trying to perfect my processes for ipa's and hoppy pale beers. lately i've been going with 1 week fermentation, dry hopping for an additional week and then force carbing in a keg and tasting. The beer from kettle to tasting is generally a 2 week period.

i'm finding after only 2 weeks the beer is not necessarily what i was expecting. i realize that 2 weeks is pretty young for a beer but i also know that from listening to cybi they often are turning around beers in short times and getting cloned results. on the other hand listening to an older episode of the session tasty talks about brewing his ipa 5 weeks prior to judging so it will peak at the right time.

it may just be that my processes still require some fine tuning but i was just wondering what others are doing. does a beer change that much between 2 weeks of age and 5?

tks

tg

I have a pretty good brew schedule to keep my pipeline going so I have about a 6-8 week lag time between brewing and tasting a beer for the first time.

2 weeks in the primary
2-4 weeks in secondary for cold crashing
2-4 weeks keg conditioning

I ferment 3 weeks pretty much 90% of the time, never less, sometimes more. I keg and force carbonate for a couple of days and drink immediately after that. My beer *always* tastes best 2 weeks after kegging and usually gets better till it is finished.

If I were (and I am this month) to brew for a competition I would allow a minimum of 2 weeks in the keg before bottling or serving, so 5 weeks total.

I am sure YMMV,

Iophon

In my personal opinion, there question can be answered easily.

For me the aging process is a variable that is determined by the beer. For beers like Barleywines and Russian Imperial stouts. I like to leave these beers aging for 6 months minimum before placing on tap. But Hefe's and other wheat beers are good 2 weeks after puting in serving kegs. Pale Ales and IPA's tend to 3 to 4 weeks. Browns and lighter porters 2 - 3 months. Sour beers require years.

I don't know what you use to track your brewing process. The software that I use has tasting notes that can be attached, which I use. Try to document your tastings somewhere even if it is an excel spreadsheet or a peice of paper that you tape to the keg, this will help you to build profiles for your beers, so you can figure out what your desired aging profiles are for the beers you brew.

Hope this helps, the other philosophy I can offer is put it on tap right away, it will get better as time goes by, then you get to enjoy the chaging profile of your beer as it ages, which is really something to be enjoyed. I am friend with the head brewer at a brew pub down the street from where I work. I very much enjoy going there and him giving me samples of something he is aging out. Watch the different flavors become dominent and then background. Sometimes it is very difficult to tell that it is even the same beer.