r/beer • u/Independent-Pizza525 • 11h ago
15 Years and Still Delicious
When my dad passed in 2023 I inherited his cellar full of barrel aged imperial stouts. He had started collecting and cellaring beers in the late 00s and kept it up until not too long before he passed. The problem was, in his last 5 or 6 years his drinking had slowed dramatically, meaning that by the time he passed his collection was… well, stout.
At the time I did my best to pass off beers onto a number of his friends and his two brothers. Despite my best efforts I still brought home somewhere in the ball park of 80 barrel aged imperial stouts.
Over the last three years I have certainly put a dent in them, but I’m not a heavy drinker myself, so I am still sitting on around 50.
That brings me to today. I decided I needed to make some beer bread and some chili (which I like to add some dark beer to). Not wanting to sacrifice anything particularly good I opted to pull the oldest bottle from the collection and see if it was still good. The 2011 Stone Brewing Russian Imperial Stout was surprisingly (or not) still fantastic! Luckily, the 22oz bottle was enough for both my bread and my chili with enough left over for me to have a glass.
So here I am, enjoying a loaf of fresh bread that my dad would have loved alongside some chili that he would have hated (he didn’t like beans). The beer is gone having been drunk while cooking, but I am thankful that I still get to enjoy these beers that my dad left behind. He was the one who got me into craft beer and every time I open one of his collection I can’t help but reminisce a little. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to actually finish out what he left me, but it will take me a few more years to get to the last of them so I’ll figure that out then.