Beer Storage Tips

Image: Simon Murrell

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As prices go up on almost everything you eat and drink, it makes sense to try to get things fresh and keep them that way. Check "best-by" dates; eyeball the produce. Put dairy in the fridge, meat in the meat drawer, and tomatoes on the counter. Soft drinks seem bulletproof, while wine has to be kept cool and out of sunlight. Everyone 21 and older knows this stuff.

Nobody seems to know what to do with beer, however—including a lot of the people who sell it. I see too many six-packs of bottles sitting in glass-front coolers lit by fluorescent tubes. Light is death to beer.

I learned about that and other ways in which beer can go bad by doing a series of experiments on some freshly bottled beer from a local brewery. I put it in bright sunshine. I froze it. I slow-roasted it in the oven. I subjected it to eight cycles of chilling and warming. I felt bad mistreating beer like that, but those beers suffered so other beers could be better. Here's what I found.

Keep your beer in the dark
The beers that sat in the sun got real whiffy; the technical term is light struck, but most of us call it "skunked." (In skunkless Britain, it's called "cat's piss.") Dave Radzanowski, former president of the Siebel Institute, America’s oldest brewing school, explained that part of the chemical makeup of hop oil is light sensitive. When light of a particular wavelength hits it, "there's a photosynthetic reaction which changes that grouping to that of the common 'skunk' aroma." Sunlight and fluorescent light are especially harmful; incandescent light is less potent.

I had my bottles in the sun for more than eight hours—overkill. "If you have a beer in clear glass exposed to direct sunlight, it can go skunky in five to 10 seconds," Radzanowski said. Brown glass offers some protection, but clear or green offers a marginal amount. Some brewers use hop extracts that are immune to light—Miller included—and some beers with a low hops content can get away with clear bottles. But to be safe, buy beer that hasn't been sitting in the light, and keep it in the dark. Cans, of course, keep out all the light.

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