WHEN Matthew VandenBerghe brings home his favorite beers, he doesn’t make room for them in the fridge. He takes them to his beer cellar.

It’s a pitch-black basement room that stays 54 degrees year round. Sprayed concrete walls conduct the cool ground temperature while creating a cave-like appearance, and water he has had piped in drips down one side, both adding to the troglodyte effect and keeping the humidity between 60 and 70 percent.

Racks around the ceiling hold a few bottles of wine, but the shelves, which seem carved into the walls, mostly hold hundreds of bottles of beer that ages in the cellar, getting better over time.

“Every beer in there you could drink a year from now and it would be great,” said Mr. VandenBerghe, who owns Bottleworks Beer Store and Brouwers Café in Seattle. “But I’m planning to hold some for 20 to 25 years.”