Rare Beer Was Once a Collector’s Dream. Now, It’s a Liability.
A group of former hipsters sit around a San Francisco apartment in bow ties, newsboy caps, and suspenders. They listen to 2012 indie folk music. Someone jokingly calls it a “lost ‘Portlandia’ episode.”
The group has gathered — in the present day, mind you — to drink craft beers from the previous decade.
A 2015 bottle of Firestone Walker Stickee Monkee, a barrel-aged quadruple from California. A Scarface Imperial Stout from Speakeasy Ales & Lagers. A 14-year-old De Struise Brouwers Black Albert, a Russian imperial stout (from Belgium) once considered one of the finest beers in the world around the time it was purchased.
This gathering is what the host, Wes Leslie, calls an “expired craft beer party.”
In the early-2010s, he had begun collecting barrel-aged beers, buying rare releases when he worked at Speakeasy, grabbing other cool bottles he saw when he hit specialty beer stores in town, like the famed (and now closed) City Beer Store in San Francisco.
“I just thought it’d be like fun to have a little cellar,” Leslie tells me. And by “cellar,” he meant some bottles tucked under his bar. “Then the years passed and I just sort of fell out of love with beer. I became more of a cocktail guy. Then it was just like, I’ve sat on them so long, I don’t even like beer anymore.”
Thus, the expired craft beer party where Leslie and several other friends — many former craft beer nuts themselves who had fondly enjoyed the beers when they were fresh in the previous era — tasted through a few dozen over-aged bottles.
Though Leslie found all the beers still interesting, and some better than others, he ultimately agreed they had aged way too long and were now “kinda disgusting.”
At least they were no longer in his life.
Cellaring or Hoarding?
I, too, bought and cellared way too much beer during the last decade.
Cases and cases of Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout and its many variants. Wax-dipped bombers of Three Floyds Dark Lord that I actually acquired at Dark Lord Day in Indiana back in 2010. Countless stouts from breweries like Hardywood Park, Founders, and Side Project and wild ales from breweries like The Rare Barrel, Jester King, and de Garde. I still have a full vertical of The Bruery’s 12 Days of Christmas, a series I began collecting in 2008 with the release of Partridge in a Pear Tree and ended seven years ago with the release of 12 Drummers Drumming.
When did this “cellaring” — this hoarding — begin?
I began drinking craft beer casually in college, back when fruit beers like Sam Adams Cherry Wheat, Abita Purple Haze, and Magic Hat #9 signaled something other than the ubiquitous macro swill. After I moved to New York, in the nascent days of the city’s craft beer scene, I bought 6-packs of whatever quality stuff I could find — Brooklyn Lager, Victory HopDevil, Belgian imports like Duvel — and fully consumed it before the weekend was over. But by the late aughts, distribution was improving and I was getting obsessive. I found Beer Advocate’s Top 100 Beers in the World and set out to taste them all.
Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and Younger, Portsmouth Brewing Kate The Great, Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout, the aforementioned Black Albert.
These were limited beers you sometimes had to travel the country to find, high-ABV beers released perhaps once per year, beers you had to go to specific spots in Europe to nab, like the longtime “#1 beer in the world” Westvleteren XII, a Trappist quadruple released almost exclusively from the monastery and so rustic in appearance it literally didn’t even have a label.
These were still my broke and single days, which meant I was constantly moving apartments throughout the five boroughs and, thus, the idea of cellaring beers was mostly an impossibility. Still, I slowly started setting a few choice ones aside — Firestone Walker Parabola, The Bruery Black Tuesday, Surly Darkness — whenever I got more than one bottle of them. The stash moved with me each time, not to a cellar but to a closet floor, the back of a pantry, sometimes the bookshelf, wedged in beside whatever I was reading that year.
That changed when I moved in with the woman who’d become my wife in 2012. Suddenly I had roots, a multi-room apartment with no roommates (besides her), and somewhere permanent to put beer. She’d taken me for a minimalist — a couple suitcases of clothes, a few boxes of books, not a stick of furniture. She’d soon learn I was just waiting for space.
Craft beer was hitting a fever pitch by then, with events and rare releases and festivals nearly every weekend, and I was finally making a little money. So when I came upon cases of Goose Island Bourbon County Rare — their famed imperial stout aged, for the first time, in 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle barrels — at a Whole Foods in 2010, I could afford several bottles even at $45 a pop. When I hit a release of The Lost Abbey’s Duck Duck Gooze in Southern California, I muled an entire case home. And when we traveled to Belgium in 2013, I jammed as many bottles of Cantillon into my luggage as I could legally get back to America without lying to customs.
Yes, I was drinking plenty of these beers over the years — god, I still wish I had some of that Duck Duck Gooze — but I was cellaring even more.
And then, like Leslie, somewhere around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I kind of fell out of love with beer.
The Regret
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not regret my ridiculous collection,” says Christopher Nyren, referring to his complete set of every Goose Island “big” beer (stouts, barleywine, strong ales) ever released, even bootlegs.
The 48-year-old Chicago man started cellaring beer in 2014, as the hobby was peaking: hazy IPAs traded across the country weekly, pastry stouts flipped online the day they dropped, and, as Nyren puts it, “rare lambics selling like vintage Bordeaux.” His cellar once topped 500 bottles; he’s since winnowed it to around 350, mostly centered on Revolution’s Deep Wood barleywine cans and 88 bottles of rare lambic — among them a birth-year 1977 Cantillon and a jeroboam of Bokke Framboos — kept in a walk-in wine fridge he built inside the sub-basement nuclear bomb shelter he uses as a cellar (seriously).
“They’ve all passed their prime, and at this point you might as well just crack them.”
By his own count he’s spent $12,500 on the beer currently down there, and he knows he couldn’t get half that for it now, because nobody buys secondary-market beer anymore. Likewise, he laments it’s gotten quite hard to get beer nerds together for bottle shares or themed verticals, no matter how high-caliber the offerings.
“Nowadays, it’s hard to even give away your beer,” says Nyren.
He would know, as he’s spent real effort helping friends purge their own hoards, including one sitting on hundreds of bottles from Pips Meadery — once the top-rated producer on all of Untappd — who just wanted them gone. “He was less price sensitive and more focused on speed to close,” Nyren says. With the meads, he fears he’ll never find a single buyer at all.
The lament is everywhere. On the forums and private Facebook groups once used to buy, sell, and trade these bottles, collectors now post about cellars they can’t unload. One recent thread was titled “A Nightmare on Cellar Street.”
My friend and fellow booze scribe Brad Japhe has an immense cellar too, including, like me and Nyren, tons of old bottles of Bourbon County Brand Stout. He jokes that no one he knows would be impressed anymore if he uncorked a 2013 Proprietor’s, a Chicago-only release that once sold for hundreds.
He did find one good way to draw down the stash. A diehard Knicks fan, Japhe booked a hotel room on the team’s championship parade route in June and invited friends up to drink through once-ballyhooed bottles, including a 12-year-old Russian River Consecration. It was still tasty, but showed him the folly in having sat on it so long.
“Guess what, it didn’t really taste at all better than any Consecration you’d just pluck from the shelf in 2026,” he told me. “So maybe we were oversold on the idea of cellaring being so worthwhile with wild ales.”
Indeed, back in the 2010s, the case for cellaring was everywhere from magazine features to endless message-board threads.
“One of the hottest trends right now is aging craft beer,” wrote Patrick Dawson, author of “Vintage Beer: A Taster’s Guide to Brews That Improve Over Time,” in a piece for The Denver Post back in 2015. His advice, at the time, was to age beers from the “S” categories: strong, sour, or smoked. Barleywines, stouts, Belgian strong ales, lambics, Flanders reds — or pretty much everything in my cellar.
At the time, Dawson had over 200 beers, with some dating back to 1972.
“For the most part with those beers, it’s more just fun to open a beer that old,” he said. “It’s pretty unusual for one of those to actually be a really enjoyable experience to drink. More often than not, they are just going to be more muted with not a lot of flavor.”
Crack ’Em
Early on in the pandemic, my family moved to bigger digs and since 2020 I’ve had, for the first time, an actual cellar, a low-ceilinged room in our Brooklyn apartment where my head nearly scrapes the exposed pipes. We store our tools there, extra lightbulbs, the ski gear, holiday decorations…and the hundreds of “rare” beers I spent tens of thousands of dollars on back in the late aughts and 2010s.
Now, whenever I head down for the power drill or to grab a suitcase before a trip, I’m met by this wall of beer, confronted by the follies of my past.
Deschutes The Abyss, Kuhnhenn Fourth Dementia, Bell’s Black Note, Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout (the ultra-rare apple brandy version no less!), boxes upon boxes of Firestone Walker Anniversary.
All caked in dust.
I’m 47 now and I mostly drink spirits and cocktails. I still drink beer, but I don’t fetishize it, and I certainly don’t collect it. I buy pilsners and lagers and the occasional IPA, and they go in the fridge and get drunk within days, the same way I drank beer at 22. Meanwhile the cellar holds boxes of coffee-infused imperial stouts and 18 percent barleywines and wax-dipped pastry stouts in 750-mL bottles, each one surely a night-long project that would leave me bloated and overwhelmed by acid reflux for days.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not regret my ridiculous collection.”
I was saving these beers for some special occasion. But plenty of special occasions came and went and I never drank them.
And there they sit: too worthless now to sell, too heavy to haul upstairs on a whim, too fraught to simply throw away because tossing them would mean admitting my wife was right a decade ago, when she kept asking why I needed to buy more beer when I already had so much.
I only had one choice, and Leslie’s advice kept ringing in my head:
“They’ve all passed their prime, and at this point you might as well just crack them.”
The Uncellaring
And so I did, almost nightly for a month straight.
The first chance came on our 12th wedding anniversary. As it happened, I’d cellared a few of the beers we’d actually served at the wedding, including a 2014 The Bruery Mischief, a Belgian-style golden ale we’d both loved.
The bottlecap came off with a sad little wheeze — not promising. I poured us each a wine glass anyway. Flat and flabby, the hops were long gone, and whatever brightness it once had faded to a dull, oxidized maltiness. It was…not good. We poured roughly 730 of the 750 mL bottle down the sink. Happy anniversary, honey. At least the cellar was one bottle smaller.
Next up was a 2015 Russian River Sanctification, their sublime wild ale aged in Pinot Noir barrels with cherries added. Also flat, also a disappointment. As was the Jester King SPON 2016 Méthode Gueuze, once one of the greatest American beers of all time.
But they weren’t all duds. A 2017 Bourbon County Coffee had held up beautifully, its coffee turned to a rich, milk-chocolate mocha — this despite Goose Island’s own label promising it only “develops for up to 5 years in the bottle.” The Rodenbach Alexander from 2016 surprised me too, still tart and vinegary with a pleasing nuttiness, this was from a time when craft beer was still so exciting that I actually broke the release news for Esquire!
My interview had inspired Nyren, too. One night he cracked a long-cellared vertical of Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze from the 2005 and 2008 “Nightlights” editions through the 2010, 2012, and 2014 vintages, the latter of which was still thankfully a standout.
“I had given up on ever drinking these and was trying to just sell ’em off until [it] summoned my old competitive collective OCD drinking spirit,” he joked.
Digging deep in my cellar one weekend, I found a small collection of BFM Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien, a Swiss strong sour red ale aged in oak barrels. This was once, maybe, my favorite beer in the world, yet one I’d somehow forgotten I owned eight bottles of. The 2012 vintage brought it all flooding back, transportive as Proust’s madeleine, though not to a French childhood but to a decade ago, when people like me still cared about $40 bottles of sour Swiss beer.
Like Nyren, I was realizing I kind of missed our rare beer–drinking days, even if neither of us exactly wanted them back.
That crystallized one quiet Tuesday, when I pulled out an Against the Grain London Balling, a bourbon-barrel English barleywine from the Louisville brewery. If anything should survive a decade in the cellar it’s a barrel-aged barleywine, but this one was thin and hollow, barely there. What did come rushing back, however, was buying it back in 2012, on my first ever trip to Kentucky. That trip was where I first truly fell in love with bourbon, and where, without quite noticing, my main focus slowly began drifting from beer to whiskey.
And then I looked over at the shelves in my dining room. One floor above the beer cellar I no longer added to, out in the open where anyone could see, I’d spent the most recent decade building a still-growing collection of several hundred bottles of whiskey.
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