Author: Greg Foster

Every beer snob knows that hoppy IPA degrades rapidly with age and must be consumed moments after bottling, lest they turn into cardboard flavored garbage. I count myself among the fresh IPA advocates, always checking the born-on date of store bought bottles to confirm they are still within the drinkability window. Some breweries even take it upon themselves to strongly request their beers be consumed fresh. For example, a box of Pliny The Elder states people must drink the beer fresh and not age it a whopping 10 times!

I recently had an experience that made me second guess this brewing maxim. I’d brewed a clone version of this delicious Russian River Brewing staple and was “blindly” comparing it to a fresh bottle of the real McCoy packaged just 2 weeks prior. Unsurprisingly, and much to my dismay, the beers were fairly distinguishable, despite being similar in many respects. We then whipped out a much older bottle of Pliny The Elder that was packaged 2 months before the tasting. The IPA truth that has been drilled into my brain had me convinced I’d easily be able to tell the beers apart, but shockingly, I couldn’t. Was this a fluke? Could an older IPA really be indistinguishable from a fresh version? Perhaps my taste buds just aren’t up to snuff? Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to repeat this fun little exBEERiment with a larger group of truly blind tasters.

| PURPOSE |

To evaluate the differences between a 2 week old commercial bottle of Pliny the Elder and an 11 week old bottle.

| METHODS |

A coupld hophead friends of mine were in Santa Rosa the week Pliny The Younger was released, so they stopped by Russian River Brewing and picked up a couple cases of Pliny The Elder. Thanks entirely to their generosity and commitment to science, they both donated many bottles of the hard-to-find elixir to my cause. Two months later, I received a tip that fresh Pliny The Elder bottles were available at a local store in my area, so I did what any self-respecting beer lover would do and immediately ditched work to buy some! The date printed on the bottles revealed the beer to be quite fresh, packaged a mere 2 weeks prior to purchase.

At just over 2 months older than the bottles gifted to me by my friends, I was comfortable enough time had elapsed for changes in character to occur. I stored both beers in the same cool refrigerator until it was time to collect data later that week. In order to preserve the blindness of participants, I wrapped the bottles in mylar bags and covered the Russian River logo on the cap with tape.

Bottles prepared, I tossed the beers in a cooler and set out to begin the great Pliny exBEERiment!

| RESULTS |

A total of 24 members of the Pacific Gravity Homebrew Club participated in this xBmt during a monthly meeting.

Each taster was served 1 sample of fresh Pliny The Elder and 2 samples of old Pliny The Elder in different colored opaque cups then instructed to identify the unique sample. In order to reach statistical significance with this sample size, 13 (p<0.05) would have had to accurately identify the fresh Pliny The Elder as being different, though only 11 (p=0.14) were capable of doing so, suggesting tasters were unable to reliably distinguish Pliny The Elder that was 2 weeks old from one that was over 2 months old.

The participants who were correct on the initial triangle test were asked to complete a brief survey on preference that included only the two different beers. Since significance wasn’t reached on the triangle test, this data ought to be taken with a grain of salt, but I thought it interesting enough to share. Of the 11 tasters who completed this portion of the survey, all still blind to the variable being investigated, 5 preferred the fresh sample, 4 preferred the old bottle, and 2 had no preference despite reporting they noticed a difference.

After completing the survey, and before revealing the nature of the xBmt, I asked club members individually what they thought of my “homebrewed” beer. Unaware of the beer’s stellar pedigree, members described it as a pretty good IPA, though no one came close to guessing that they were secretly drinking the Pliny The Elder. I finally unveiled the beer’s secret identity to an astonished crowd who, strangely, seemed quite eager to drink the leftover samples.

My Impressions: While I was unable to tell the fresh from the old Pliny The Elder apart in my initial attempts, my performance during the club meeting was quite a bit better as I was able to consistently distinguish between the two beers. It’s difficult to describe, but I perceived a small yet distinct sharpness in the aroma of the old sample that wasn’t present in the fresh beer. But that was about it, I wasn’t able to taste much of a difference at all and relied almost entirely on smell. Why I was able to tell a difference this time and not previously, I have no clue. Perhaps there was a minor recipe tweak or ingredient substitution difference between these two batches? I suppose I’ll never know, but overall I’d say my biased preference was for the fresh stuff.

| DISCUSSION |

As any commercial brewery who packages and distributes their beer will likely agree, freshness has one mortal enemy: oxygen. Consumers want the beer they pour from a bottle/can to be just as delicious as what they can get on tap at the brewery, and in the growing world of craft beer where multiple versions of the same style line supermarket shelves, quality is the name of the game. Because of this, many professional brewers take seemingly extreme measures to ensure as little oxygen as possible makes it to the final package in hopes of keeping drinkers coming back. On that note…

Kudos to Russian River Brewing Company!

From a purely quantitative standpoint, these beers can be said to be different inasmuch as they came from different batches, were packaged at different points, and spent different lengths of time “on the shelf,” so to speak. And still, presumably due to the brewers’ attention to detail and care for their product during bottling, tasters could not reliably distinguish the old beer from the fresh one. This speaks volumes about Russian River’s quality control and is likely a driving factor in why their beers are lauded by drinkers the world over.

But seriously, if you find yourself in possession of fresh Pliny The Elder, or any other highly regarded IPA for that matter, do as Russian River says and drink it fresh!

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