At my parents’ place there is a coolroom full of stuff. Some of which has been there for some time. That includes various beers, which I’ve seen sitting at the back of one of the shelves for ages. I kept an eye on them and, the longer they stayed there, the more I figured no-one was drinking them. And also, I figured no-one would miss them if I took some of them away.

So that’s just what I did.

Now some of these look pretty old. We’re talking at least a decade. They’ve got dirty, faded labels, rusted caps and best-before dates from the last century. As a bit of a beer geek I was curious to see if any of these would still taste okay.

So lets start proceedings with one of the oldest beers – King and Barnes Festive Ale. As you can see by the pictures of the label and the cap, this isn’t in the best condition. According to the side of the label, this really should have been drunk before July 1998, which makes it at least 15 years old. Another sign of its age? I don’t think this beer even exists any more. It’s more than a decade old but I was just the ninth person to check this beer into Untappd.

Not familiar with drinking old beer I mightn’t have taken enough care when uncapping the beer because I got little flakes of rust in the head of the beer when I poured it into a glass.

The beer didn’t look that attractive in the glass – like dirty pond water. I took a whiff and got some musty, slightly sour aroma, with metallic tinges.

Drinking it, there’s a slightly sour flavour around the edges but with some toffee and treacle in the middle. Those flavours in the middle make me think this might have been a decent enough beer back in 1998 but it hasn’t held together too well in the 15 years since (which isn’t surprising for a 5.3 per cent beer).

If I was a beer geek back in 1998 I reckon I might have bought some of this.