We spent the weekend 'Down the Island' which is Phillip Island which is about an hour and half from Melbourne. My brother has a house there, and on this long weekend we decided that we would be doing retro activities, this involves ten pin bowling and crazy gold with my nieces and then we jettisoned the kids and moved to night drinking, but in this drinking we kept the retro theme.
How? by drinking old beer, that is beer that's been sitting in 'cellars' (actually cupboards for my brother and a cabinet in my storage room in my the underground car park in my apartment building for me) for a number of years.
First up was a series called B2 Bomber from Bridge Road brewers who are one of the oldest craft beer producers in Australia, they are located in Beechworth, which is about 3 hours north of Melbourn. This version is Mach 5.0, by my reasoning given they just released Mach 15 this came out in 2015.
B2 Bomber is a double black Belgian IPA, which means in it's fresh form it is punching with hops, in the instance of Mach 5.0 Engima, El Dorado and Moasiac, but when it's a old as this is the hop character is gone and you are left with a belgian black ale, which I have to say works really well, it's booze (10%) has rounded out and it's actually just gentle and luxurious.
Through the Magic of Untappd I worked before last week I'd drunk this beer 8 times, which is a weirdly high number for a 10% Black Belgian IPA - we spent a fair amount of time which drinking working out what was going on in September 2015 when I was drinking this often at a pub called the Royal Mail. It would turn out that this was the end of the regular season of the AFL and into Finals. This was also the last time my team - North Melbourne were actually any good. Maybe drinking this will be a good omen (we did actually win the next day for only the third time this year so maybe I need to source more of this beer to ensure this winning streak continues)
The next night we stepped it up a gear with a couple of different years of Big Foot, which is a Barley wine from Sierra Nevada. Now I have a number of bottles of this in my 'cellar' why? well you used to be able to get this beer really easily in Australia, and it was realtively cheap, back in 2014 the exchnage rate of the Aussie dollar to the US Dollar was about 84 cents, in 2026 it is about 65 cents so things from the US are not so cheap.
We also decided to pair this beer with one of the easiest drinking, very smooth whiskeys that I know of. It's red Breast which is an irish pot still whiskey - if you haven't tried it. seek it out, it's this amazing buttery whiskey, so so good.
But back to the beers, this are both ageing beautifully, it drinks far better aged than it does when it's new. New it's a bit spicy and a bit to boozy, but give it 10 years (actually 5 year would be better) sitting in a cool dark space and it rounds itself out, tones down the harshness and gets way more layered and sophisicated. A very very good beer.